AMD Zen to Bring Greater than 40% IPC Increase, New Reports Suggests

[Valentyn]

how about stuff like video editing, encoding, image processing etc? It will probably rock on those tasks compared to i3 / i5

 

Obviously not required for typical user...

 

That depends on what codec you'll be exporting to. Intel i3/i5's have QuickSync which is amazing at exporting in H.264, and can easily best a Xeon or Haswell-E sometimes.

[SurvivorNVL]

Greater than 40%?  Can I get 55%?  That'd be nice.  I want to see near Skylake that way it can compete against Kaby and Skylake-E.

[ivan134]

The only problem is no one needs an 8 core zen.Its nice to have but its too late most of the people already have i3's /i5's.

Unless the next generation games/programs will start requiring such a cpu it will not be a sale success.The cpu arhitecture might be but it comes at a bad time.

Im sure intel has something up their sleeve they havent thrown any peformance in their cpu's since sandy bridge, if amd comes with an 8 core 300$ overclockable monster that trump's the i7 k edition then Intel will have to respond, if i were intel i would have saved something for a time like this during all that monopoly time.

Let me see if I can navigate my way through these mental gymnastics: you think AMD shouldnt bother releasing an 8 core zen because intel will finally release a product that people have been wanting them to release but wouldnt because there is no competition? Am I getting that right?

[Starelementpoke]

I pray to my Lord RNG that this is true.

[Kobathor]

Greater than 40%?  Can I get 55%?  That'd be nice.  I want to see near Skylake that way it can compete against Kaby and Skylake-E.

I don't think it's going to beat Kaby Lake, probably not even Skylake. I don't think they're going for the most powerful cores ever, but instead the best price/performance ratio. If they beat or match Haswell and are cheaper, people will buy them since they offer the new technologies over Haswell (DDR4, USB3.1 on-chipset, more USB 3.0, more PCI-E lanes, more extra iO, ect stuff Haswell doesn't have.) That's when I would buy one. 

[don_svetlio]

I don't think it's going to beat Kaby Lake, probably not even Skylake. I don't think they're going for the most powerful cores ever, but instead the best price/performance ratio. If they beat or match Haswell and are cheaper, people will buy them since they offer the new technologies over Haswell (DDR4, USB3.1 on-chipset, more USB 3.0, more PCI-E lanes, more extra iO, ect stuff Haswell doesn't have.) That's when I would buy one. 

BRB, Selling my 4590

[Starelementpoke]

BRB, Selling my 4590

Sell my 4690k too real quick.

[harrynowl]

I think they said it was 40% over steamroller. I did some numbers a while ago and figured it'd be like 3% slower than Haswell IPC. But cores, clocks and stuff are unknown.

[Benji_w]

Yeah you just have to have phase change or LN2 otherwise it is a 9350

 

Not really...

 

My FX is 5ghz stable on water.

[Benji_w]

I think they said it was 40% over steamroller. I did some numbers a while ago and figured it'd be like 3% slower than Haswell IPC. But cores, clocks and stuff are unknown.

 

What if it's 40% faster than a 5ghz overclocked steam roller? Who knows.

[harrynowl]

What if it's 40% faster than a 5ghz overclocked steam roller? Who knows.

Well it was 40% faster per clock.

[Benji_w]

Well it was 40% faster per clock.

 

All I'm saying is all this speculation and ney saying from everyone is boring, AMD could of sold off some stock or whatever recently but they didn't so they're pretty confident that Zen will do alright.

 

Lets just wait for it to drop and see what happens.

[Prysin]

if it matches skylake...

 

man, upgrade itch again...

[Real_PhillBert]

I'll believe it when I see it.

[SurvivorNVL]

I don't think it's going to beat Kaby Lake, probably not even Skylake. I don't think they're going for the most powerful cores ever, but instead the best price/performance ratio. If they beat or match Haswell and are cheaper, people will buy them since they offer the new technologies over Haswell (DDR4, USB3.1 on-chipset, more USB 3.0, more PCI-E lanes, more extra iO, ect stuff Haswell doesn't have.) That's when I would buy one. 

Oh, I know it won't beat Skylake.  Hopefully it can compete and if hopefully if it can't - they can burn up quickly and get spread between Intel and Nvidia within a year.  I would love AM4, though.  Need an 8c/16t processor under $1000, and I'd be golden.

[MageTank]

The 40% IPC number is over Excavator people. It has been advertised as this for a long time now. Excavators IPC is already slightly improved over the previous generations of FX SKU's, so 40% was going to put it right on par with Haswell. If what this report is saying is true, we might see Skylake IPC out of Zen (Again, take this with a grain of salt because at this point, its a rumor from the company itself).

 

Even if it fails to match Skylake, and just matches Haswell, we will see 8 core CPU's with Haswell IPC, with DDR4 support and a plethora of instruction sets (If they use the same instruction sets as their previous platform, on top of the newer ones they just made exclusively for Zen, then it should be pretty nice). This might allow Zen to disrupt the Z97 and X99 markets (Maybe even the Z170 market, if the IPC boost is somewhere around 45-50%). Sadly, the lack of AVX3 means it won't have too much staying power in my eyes. Let's hope AMD includes it in their Zen+ batch.

[Mister Snow]

I think they said it was 40% over steamroller. I did some numbers a while ago and figured it'd be like 3% slower than Haswell IPC. But cores, clocks and stuff are unknown.

 

It's 40% over excavator.

[harrynowl]

It's 40% over excavator.

Even better.

[azurezeed]

Come on we need zen, lets hope that Keller did a good job

[Trixanity]

AMD has as far as I'm concerned stated multiple times it's 40% over Excavator, so the "lol over Bulldozer amirite?" needs to stop.

Also, "over 40% increase" is most likely just marketing. It's a blanket term for 40% or above. I think it was Gran Turismo that advertised something like "over 900" cars and it had exactly 900 cars in the game. Don't put too much into that statement. Expect 40%, not more. If it does exceed that, then be pleasantly surprised. But don't go around thinking over 40% suddenly means 50% or 60% and then call bullshit when it finally arrives and shows 40%.

 

Another point: people expect AMD to sell 8 core processors for $200-300. You will be so disappointed that it's not even funny. AMD has stated that they don't want to be a budget option anymore and nor should they be. The 8 core SKUs will be competing against the X99 platform, not Z170. So that's how it will be priced. 4 core SKUs with AMDs SMT solution enabled will compete with your i7s at the $300 price range or whatever. I could easily imagine a 8 core SMT enabled SKU going for $800 - all depending on what SKUs AMD produces and how Broadwell-E will be priced but from what I understand, their 8 core SKU will still be $999 and the new 10 core SKU $1499, so I'd still say $800-900 would be unsurprising. Might even be more.

[Humbug]

^^To add to above post. The reason AMD positioned themselves as the extreme low cost CPU option in the last few years is that they had no other choice. You can be sure that AMD does not like selling these big 8-core CPUs at sub $200 prices. No wonder the company is making losses. But they do it because they have no choice (given the performance).

 

When Zen performs better they will (rightly) jump at the opportunity to improve their margins.

 

If you look at the GPU market Nvidia is only slightly more expensive and not always. AMD has a full product range with performance scaling all the way from budget options right upto $1000 GPUs. They price that way because they can, and they can because the performance is competitive.

 

And that's how it will be for Zen if the performance is competitive with Intel. If it's not and they end up once again with a new generation having to be sold with all the  CPUs on budget prices with no margins then we can say goodbye to AMD.

[NuclearPeace]

Another point: people expect AMD to sell 8 core processors for $200-300. You will be so disappointed that it's not even funny. AMD has stated that they don't want to be a budget option anymore and nor should they be.

 

This.

 

AMD's current strategy... rather the only thing they can do is to compete on price. AMD wants to have premium things that they can charge more for because that's what makes money. Lets remind ourselves that the 8150 started at $245, the A10-7850K costed as much as an i5, and the Nano started at $650. Now you can find a 8320 for around $100, 7850ks for around $120, and a Nano at $500.

 

AMD Zen has to bring something to the table that Skylake isn't providing and be convincing enough of a switch so that people buy it. If Zen is as fast as Haswell, then what's the incentive for people on Ivy bridge or newer to switch? Going to Zen would require a new motherboard and having to buy DDR4 RAM whereas you could just buy a 3770k/4790k and spend less. AMD can compete on value again, but unless Zen is small and cheap to produce that won't create the money AMD needs.

 

There just isn't enough information about Zen to really draw any conclusions. All we have so far is that it's supposed to be 40% clock for clock faster than Excavator. What about power efficiency? Are average clock rates higher or lower?  Does it overclock well or not at all?

[Humbug]

What about power efficiency? Are average clock rates higher or lower?  Does it overclock well or not at all?

Ya we don't know much about power... The only thing we do know is the flagship part has a TDP of 95 watts.

Which is a lower than current

fx-9370      220 watts

fx-8350     125 watts

etc...

[LokiFire]

Oh baby... AMD man you better deliver or no purchases, i have held out on fulfilling the Haswell purchase in my sig, make it happen.

[SurvivorNVL]

The 40% IPC number is over Excavator people. It has been advertised as this for a long time now. Excavators IPC is already slightly improved over the previous generations of FX SKU's, so 40% was going to put it right on par with Haswell. If what this report is saying is true, we might see Skylake IPC out of Zen (Again, take this with a grain of salt because at this point, its a rumor from the company itself).

 

Even if it fails to match Skylake, and just matches Haswell, we will see 8 core CPU's with Haswell IPC, with DDR4 support and a plethora of instruction sets (If they use the same instruction sets as their previous platform, on top of the newer ones they just made exclusively for Zen, then it should be pretty nice). This might allow Zen to disrupt the Z97 and X99 markets (Maybe even the Z170 market, if the IPC boost is somewhere around 45-50%). Sadly, the lack of AVX3 means it won't have too much staying power in my eyes. Let's hope AMD includes it in their Zen+ batch.

I forget is it Cannonlake or Skylake-E that is expected to start using AVX3?  I know Skylake-E is making use of six-channel memory, but not sure if it is making use of AVX-512.