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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texasti89 - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
AMD has been testing engineering samples for a considerable time by now. One thing I'm sure of is if this new architecture was as promising as it has been hyped, AMD would have already provided a figure or a real comparison demo to show it.I have lost the last specks of trust in AMD people since the Bulldozer was released. I don't think this time is any different.
dinin70 - Thursday, June 2, 2016 - link
Man... Size matters. They just released Polaris. Do you want AMD being able to develop simultaneously completely new CPU and GPU architectures?Be realistic... AMD can spend just over 1b$ R&D for BOTH CPU and GPU while Intel is spending about 4b$ (almost) only for CPU and Nvidia 2b$ (almost) only for GPU...
Furthermore, and they know it, Zen is make or break. If it goes wrong, AMD will probably be over. They will finetune as much as possible. This time, they really can't screw up.
Oppositely, I find it AMAZING that within a calendar year AMD is able to launch both CPU and GPU. And when you see the R9 480 being a 390-equivalent for about twice less TDP and for 200$... That's just awesome when you compare it with a GTX970 that costs the double, is more power-intensive and is slower...
Kudos to AMD.
jabber - Thursday, June 2, 2016 - link
Yes but as we have seen several times in the past AMD are fantastic at hyping up pre-launch tech demos etc. etc. Promising revolutionary leaps of performance and efficiency. Only to find on release day it's slower than the previous tech or just 5% faster. With AMD its best to expect disappointment on the CPU front, as that has been the result the past three to four releases.UtilityMax - Sunday, June 5, 2016 - link
A bigger problem with AMD APUs is not just the slow progress but also the fact that AMD doesn't seem to understand that if there are no decent computers using AMD chips, AMD will forever be relegated to picking up the scraps off the table. Google created the Nexus hardware brand in order to showcase the Android tech, and Microsoft created the Surface line in order to show of the Windows tech. AMD should take a page out of that book, and design a family or two of slick professional laptops, one for gaming/performance, kind of like the Skylake Dell XPS machines, and another line of ultra-portables in the same niche as say Lenovo Yoga. AMD chips have a lot of fans, and I suspect such products could at least break even while improving the AMD name.wumpus - Tuesday, June 7, 2016 - link
Except that both of those companies have to look *hard* for places to shove all that excess money that is falling out of each company. AMD really doesn't have that problem. I'm probably even more annoyed that AMD never seemed to make the 8+ CPU servers that the original Sledgehammers suggested (from later analysis the whole thing was BS: the bandwidth needed exploded after 4 CPUs).I think google loses money on Nexus, and I'm sure MS loses money on Surface: it doesn't help that NFL commentators call them ipads or use them to prop up ipads. This is all pretty much the penalty for paying cash for ATI (a stock swap might have saved both companies).
aamartin - Saturday, June 11, 2016 - link
Why is it amazing? It's not like it's a single design team doing both designs.SeanJ76 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
LOL@AMD!More garbage releasing soon to collect dust on shelves!
SeanJ76 - Thursday, June 9, 2016 - link
AMD is GARBAGE!fanofanand - Thursday, June 9, 2016 - link
Insightful comment, thank you for contributing enormously to the comments for this article. Pat yourself on the back big guy.