AMD Briefly Shows Off Zen “Summit Ridge” Silicon
by Ryan Smith on May 31, 2016 11:15 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Zen
- Computex_2016
- AM4
After an already packed Computex 2016 event with Radeon Polaris and Bristol Ridge/Stoney Ridge news, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su had one final surprise to close out the company’s presentation: Zen, in the flesh.
Zen taped out earlier this year, and AMD is now working on bringing it up in their labs. To that end Dr. Su pulled out a very early engineering sample of what will be AMD’s Summit Ridge CPU, an 8 core Zen-based CPU. Summit Ridge will use AMD’s new AM4 socket – currently being rolled out for Bristol Ridge – making it a drop-in platform replacement.
Little in the way of new details on Summit Ridge and Zen were released, but Dr. Su confirmed that AMD is still targeting a 40% IPC increase. On the development front, the chip still has some work to undergo, but AMD is to the point where they are going to start sampling their top-tier, high profile customers with engineering samples here in a few weeks. Wider sampling to their larger OEM base will in turn take place in Q3 of this year. AMD has not mentioned a retail product date, but keep in mind there’s a fairly significant lag time between OEM sampling and retail products.
Finally, Dr. Su also reiterated that Zen will be the basis of a range of products for AMD. Along with the desktop CPU, AMD will be using Zen as the basis of their next, 8th generation APU. And further down the line it will be appearing in server products and embedded products as well.
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junky77 - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Even Haswell has problems with GTX 1070 according to reviews I've seen - check Ashes Of singularity DX11 vs DX12 performance with an I7-5970X or something like thatDuckeenie - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Because manufacturers are known to be conservative about their claims?junky77 - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
lol, off with their heads!!Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
It depends. A 40% IPC increase would bring a kraken 1.1 score of 1200 mS, which is still garbage considering my G3258 scores under 1000 and a 6700K can easily hit 700. Hell, the next iphone is likely to do better than 1200mS.webdoctors - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
This could be really cool. I hope its not some lawyer marketing nonsense like 40% IPC per core, but its split across two threads, so its just 20% increase per thread in real benchmarks and less if they had to reduce the frequencies.If the frequencies jump as they should for the newer process, it could be the new budget superchip!
Arnulf - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Given the SMT nature of the new cores the two threads will never benefit the same from whatever IPC increase so even if is really 40% split among the two threads (both of which need to be running on the same core) the IPC gain will weigh heavily in primary thread's favor ...The typical split of 70-30 to 85-15 between primary and secondary thread means at least 30-35% IPC increase for a single thread running on the new core.
T1beriu - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
How long does the chip bring-up faze take? How many months?milli - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Where's that Excavator review Anand? You promised it more than three months ago.monsted - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Good luck to AMD! While i probably won't buy this stuff, i really look forward to someone snapping at Intels heels and making them move forward again.jabber - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
"Wider sampling to their larger OEM base " Does AMD still have a OEM base for desktop CPUs? I can't remember the last time I saw a AMD based desktop in a store. It's like the single runt AMD laptop on the shelf surrounded by Intel ones.