AMD Engineer: Developers Given Total Freedom with 'Zen'

[Prysin]

Other way around where production costs are concerned, and investors.

well there are two ways to appease the investors;

to promise great profits fast

or steady profits over time.

 

I do not think AMD will attempt to outprice themselves at this point... they need to get people to hop onto the bandwagon first, and only way to do so is to have a sensible entry price. A price that coupled with (hopefully) performance good enough to overcome the (quite unreasonable) stigma that AMD has on the CPU side. As in "it will roast baby seals and murder your parents before the PC has booted up"

[Lethal Seraph]

Hopefully it's not too late. What's it gonna do if the competition has some newer tech right after this.

[patrickjp93]

well there are two ways to appease the investors;

to promise great profits fast

or steady profits over time.

I do not think AMD will attempt to outprice themselves at this point... they need to get people to hop onto the bandwagon first, and only way to do so is to have a sensible entry price. A price that coupled with (hopefully) performance good enough to overcome the (quite unreasonable) stigma that AMD has on the CPU side. As in "it will roast baby seals and murder your parents before the PC has booted up"

They're going in server first, so I suspect prices will jump near to parity with Intel.

[dalekphalm]

FM3 was dropped A LONG time ago. All new desktop parts will be using AM4. backwards compatibility is not yet revealed, nor is it that likely to support older CPUs (due to DDR4 being in there).

Remember, the reason we have a transition from DDR3 to DDR4 like we currently do (skylake and ZEN supporting both) is because the price of DDR4 is still a tad too high. And the majority of people willing to upgrade sit on DDR3 RAM already...

Personally I expect NO backwards compatibility. At all. And I think that's the correct course for AMD to take. People have had the current iterations of AMD platforms for quite some time. They're vastly outdated.

 

For AMD to make FM2+ or AM3 CPU's compatible with AM4, they would likely need to cut too many corners and make too many compromises.

I would be very happy if AM4 Motherboards had no backwards compatibility, and in exchange, offered the full modern suite of features that we would expect on something like 2011v3, etc.

 

 

That explains why it was first named FM3.

 

Yes I kinda expect it to be like AM2+ to AM3 that only AM3 works in AM2+ because AM3 supported DDR2 and DDR3.  (AM2+ had no DDR3 compatibility)

 

I do not expect any backwards compatibility either way - whether that is AM4 CPU's in an AM3/FM2+ motherboard, or vice versa.

 

I was close with the abbrieviation  of their own version of hyperthreading, i thought it would be AMT but its SMT, only 1 letter wrong

SMT stands for Simultaneous Multithreading. That is not an "AMD" abbreviation. It's the industry standard term for it. Intel's HT is also technically SMT as well, just they use a branded term for it.

 

Do not be surprised if AMD comes up with their own branded term for SMT - AMT (Short for something like, say, "AMD Multi Threading") is actually a good guess - It sounds good and is easy to remember.

 

What I've gathered from the most recent information is that zen is going to match skylake clock for clock, will have a considerably higher base clock than skylake, is going to match at least haswell for efficiency, will have 8 full cores and 16 threads, and will be priced around $200. If that's not enough to make Intel shit themselves then I don't know what would.

Any sources to back up that "most recent information" that you've gathered? I've seen nothing at all to say that ZEN will go head to head with Skylake on the IPC side. I have no doubt it'll match Haswell (+/- a bit), and I could certainly see it coming close to Skylake, but I've seen literally no information that corroborates that.

 

Furthermore, your pricing for an 8-core, 16-thread CPU, at $200?

 

Hahaha

 

 

HAHAHAHAHAHA

 

 

AHHHHHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

 

Not going to happen. $250 MINIMUM for Zen 8-core CPU, if not $300-$400. They can't afford to price things so low that they won't make any profit at all. Though I could certainly see them pricing the 8-core CPU in the same "tier" as the i7-xxxxK SKU.

 

On Newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117369&cm_re=i7-4790k-_-19-117-369-_-Product

i7-4790K $340 USD

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117559&cm_re=i7-6700k-_-19-117-559-_-Product

i7-6700K $370 USD

 

If AMD really wants to push Zen at a low price point, they'll aim for $300 even. At $200 a piece, they might even be selling at a loss.

[themaniac]

 

SMT stands for Simultaneous Multithreading. That is not an "AMD" abbreviation. It's the industry standard term for it. Intel's HT is also technically SMT as well, just they use a branded term for it.

 

 

oh, ok

[totjup5]

They're gonna release a new chipset to go with this, right? 990FX is friggin' four years old now. That's two hundred in PC years.

 

I haven't followed AMD that closely but I do know AM3+-based chipsets have been very versatile in terms of how many generations of CPU's they've seen, at least. But they can't handle the jump to 14nm and DDR4, right? Right?

 

 

Edit: Don't want to double-post. This is actually an interesting move from AMD. Not tying down engineers is obviously what everyone says but AMD has recently been more marketing oriented. And clearly not allowing their engineers to go all out. (Re-brands!) Whether it works or not or actually even happens or not, time will tell. 

They announced a while back that it would be based on a new socket, (AM4) which I would assume means a new chipset as well.

[CTR640]

uh oh. intlel u been goofed cuz amd will trap u4evar wit zen!11!!1

[typographie]

I wish them the best of luck. But as someone who remembers the claims they made about (and the price they originally charged for) the FX-8150, I'm going to need an awful lot more than AMD's word on this.