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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artk2219 - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
HP, Toshiba, Lenovo, even Dell sometimes still make plenty of AMD based machines. Unfortunately they usually take decent parts and surround them with crap. 15" laptops with 1366 x 768 screens, 4gb of single channel memory, and the slowest hard drives you can find with an AMD A10 or FX APU. Even with the 15 and 19w chips they basically dump them into crap commodity cases with crap everything else, even though they could make some decent and fairly cheap thin and light designs that would probably sell quite well. Examples below.http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Bulldozer/AMD-FX-Ser...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Sub...
jabber - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Yeah we all know the runty AMD laptops Intel asks the OEMs to build to save them from monopoly investigations, but I'm talking...desktop. Also specifically anything with a full size FX/AM3+ chip in it.artk2219 - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
There really isnt much even on newegg, which means i doubt there would be much at a standard best buy.http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Sub...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Sub...
jabber - Thursday, June 2, 2016 - link
Yeah...AMD are so screwed at retail.Not good.Alexvrb - Thursday, June 2, 2016 - link
The initial launch of Zen is aimed at OEMs that are more open to them, like HP, as well as enthusiasts. If they can prove themselves with Zen CPUs, that will boost adoption of the platform, and help the Zen APUs nab design wins across the market. But that's not going to be easy, and it won't happen overnight.WhisperingEye - Saturday, June 4, 2016 - link
"...sometimes still make plenty.." Can someone quantify this sentence for me?Dr. Swag - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Ryan Smith and/or Ian Cutress, I don't know if you will see this, but I found this picture of the back of the Zen CPU: http://www.jagatreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2016...In the past, usually the size of the die is slightly smaller than the cut out on the back without connections/pins. Do you now if either of you could possibly approximate the size of the Zen die using that image?
Dr. Swag - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Nevermind don't think that will work... Just realized old AMD CPUs had pins over the whole socket and that for Haswell a lot of the die passed over an area with pinsShieTar - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
"shows silicone" ... Their Heatspreaders are made from silicone? Doesn't showing silicon usually mean holding up a processed waiver, so that media representatives with a quick hand and a very good optical zoom can figure out some details about the chip in question?Not to hate on AMD, but showing off something that looks exactly like its predecessor is a bit sad.
pavag - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
The 5960X was the processor that could convince me to upgrade my i7 920, for the number of cores more than the single thread performance.But his price tag killed the plan. If AMD offers something competitive, I'm going to purchase it, and since processors progress so slowly these days, it looks like I will keep it for a looong time, and Intel will not get any money from me for ages.
But it really needs to deliver performance at a reasonable price.
All the upgrades I skipped for avoiding those "5% faster than older generation CPU" piled a huge amount of money, and I want to spend it. But I will no waste 1700$ on what should be a mid range CPU.