Advanced Micro Devices is delaying the release of their high-end Zen CPU to early 2017, and will be ready for your desktop then. The company is appealing to the high-end PC gamers, which is surprising as their past CPUs were more for gamers on a budget.
The first AMD Zen CPU will include an 8 core design with 16 threads, dubbed “Summit Ridge”. The new Zen based AMD CPUs will run on the company’s new AM4 platform which will support DDR4 RAM and advanced I/O. AMD also hopes to make a comeback in the server market with AMD’s monster, “Naples”. This power CPU will include a whopping 32 cores along with 64 threads. AMD thinks that their new chip design will make it to embedded PCs in the future due to its power efficiency.
AMD’s Zen CPU benchmarks were released at a recent event at San Francisco, the CPU was compared to an Intel Broadwell-E CPU which was assumed to be the 6900K. The Blender rendering demo results showed that the 8-core, 16 thread Zen “Summit Ridge” CPU outperformed the 6900K Intel CPU, even at the same clock speeds. The Summit Ridge had completed rendering half a second before Intel’s 6900K. They’ve also showed us playing Deus Ex: Mankind Divided with the Zen based Summit Ridge CPU paired with the Radeon R9 Fury X in 4K resolution along with very smooth, playable frame rates which were of course, not disclosed.
AMD states that their new chip design can handle up to 5 times the amount of bandwidth compared to AMD’s previous design. This means that Zen based CPU will handle massive tasks more efficiently such as 4K video rendering and VR, this is a huge leap in performance by AMD.
Altogether, the Zen based AMD CPUs are 40 percent higher performance wise compared to the older chips, and have faster caches. However, there is still lots of information we don’t know, such as the Zen based CPU temps, or even clock speeds or pricing details just yet.
