AMD held their “New Horizon” event earlier today. At this event they promised to give us more details on their Zen architecture, and they sure have! They have unveiled to the public for the first time their new Zen CPU, which on the desktop side will be called RYZEN.
The details of this processor have also been made available, and the follow closely to the rumors we’ve been hearing over the past couple of months. First RYZEN is a 8-core, 16-thread part. It will operate at at least 3.4 GHz (turbo boost speeds were not mentioned), has 20 MB of L2+L3 cache, and a TDP of only 95W. The chip was made for gamers and enthusiasts and will operate on the AMD4 platform.
The chip has news sensing technologies that will help it operate better than previous AMD chips, these are being called AMD SenseMI. The first two are Neural Net Prediction and Smart Prefetch. Neural Net Prediction will use machine learning to self train and pre-load the right instructions. Smart Prefetch will anticipate and pre-load the correct instructions the application needs. AMD says these two technologies actually make up for one quarter of the improved performance boost you will see with RYZEN.
Next is Pure Power and Precision Boost. These will allow you to dial up the frequency and dial down the power on each part of the chip independently.
Finally there is Extended Frequency Range. RYZEN has the ability to sense the type of environment it is in (air cooling, water cooling, LN2) and it will enable higher clock speeds as the system gets cooler.
AMD also showed off the performance of the RYZEN CPU head to head against the $1100 Intel Core i7-6900K 8 core, 16-thread processor. The RYZEN CPU was set at 3.4 GHz with no boost at all and the Intel chip was at its out-of-the-box stock speeds of 3.2 GHz base and 3.7 GHz boost. The first test was Blender, which the two processors seemed to go head to head. Next was Handbreak where they transcoded a video. The RYZEN chip completed the job at 54 seconds compared to the 59 seconds of the i7-6900K. This is all at a lower TDP, remember RYZEN has a TDP of only 95W, compared to the 140W of the Intel chip. Keep in mind this is all before final optimization of the chip as well.
We still do not know how much AMD plans to sell the RYZEN processor for or when it will be available, but right now it does look quite promising.
