Latest Zen rumors: Competitive with Skylake?

The read sounds quite promising to get AMD back into the mix at the top. I'm not overly impressed reading that Summit Ridge is only going to compete against Haswell-E and Broadwell-E products considering how long they've been out now. Hopefully it's just a modest statement and Zen will be better than that. If that is the case though I don't see AMD stealing many Intel users away, which is a damn shame. I'm tired of seeing AMD just competing, I want them to take the crown back!

I do love that AM4 will be the socket used for everything - Intel is terrible with their constant socket change! As long as the column isn't a bunch of bullshit it certainly looks like AMD is on the right track.
 
Indeed. Make a single socket with an eye on the future, and if they plan ahead for the partner boards to support their upcoming chips for the next 5 years, people will start gravitating to AMD, not just on price (if they are like they used to be an better in that vein), but also because of ease to upgrade.
 
A fresh design could prove to be just the ticket for AMD if Intel have hit a bit of a wall with their tick-tock cycle.

But I'm sure there's bound to be more power waiting to be tapped in Intel Core chips and they could always just slash the price.


I'd be hoping Zen's main selling chip would perform in the same region as an i7 3770k / 4770k.

10,000~ overall on the Passmark chart, 2000~ single threaded with a TDP of < 95W

An optimised FX 8350 perhaps?


Selling at at price that's lower than the current Intel equivalent (to those old i7's) which would be a 6600K I believe.

i5 6600K $209.99 @ Microcenter (£140 to me)

FX 8350 $139.99 @ Microcenter (£96)

I'd pitch it at $169.99 (£120) or thereabouts.

There'd be more than enough grunt in one of those for the majority.

Anything better than that would be a bonus really - whether that's on price, TDP, speed ,etc.


Is this chart accurate? An 80/20 split.

Release a chip like the above (plus a few others) and I could easily see them jumping up to 40% of the share in the first year.

There must of ton of people out there that have weak i3 chips / Sandy/Ivy Bridge / mid range Haswell / Phenom / Athlon and would've grabbed a Quad or Hex chip if they could've aside from Intel's steep pricing.
 
Last edited:
To give you an answer based on AMD's past performance history, their past / current R&D budget and all of the strife in between the short answer is no. These are not my words but the words from AMD. Not literally of course. Their GPU's were never ever surpass nVidia. Their CPU's will never ever surpass Intel. To obtain that level of performance and accolade takes years. Infrastructure, money. lots of money and some of the smartest people in the world. AMD has not had this in place for many years and it is doubtful they ever will.

You have to understand the whole picture. Once you do, you can answer this question yourself quite easily.

As consumers we are very lucky to have a company like nVIdia who see's the value in investing in itself. It was recently revealed that they had invested over a billion dollars into the development of Pascal. Could you imagine if we had 2 companies like AMD with all their missteps, personnel woes and lack of clarity for the future? Gaming would be no where as advanced as it is now.
 
SixFootDuo said:
To give you an answer based on AMD's past performance history, their past / current R&D budget and all of the strife in between the short answer is no. These are not my words but the words from AMD. Not literally of course. Their GPU's were never ever surpass nVidia. Their CPU's will never ever surpass Intel. To obtain that level of performance and accolade takes years. Infrastructure, money. lots of money and some of the smartest people in the world. AMD has not had this in place for many years and it is doubtful they ever will.

You have to understand the whole picture. Once you do, you can answer this question yourself quite easily.

As consumers we are very lucky to have a company like nVIdia who see's the value in investing in itself. It was recently revealed that they had invested over a billion dollars into the development of Pascal. Could you imagine if we had 2 companies like AMD with all their missteps, personnel woes and lack of clarity for the future? Gaming would be no where as advanced as it is now.
Click to expand...
This has to be the worst post ever, or at least close to it.

The Nvidia behind kissing is just terrible.

But on to your points, that weren't just asinine.

AMD has had and does have some of the smartest people in their field. Their position as far as wealth and stature in the business world has little to no bearing on whether they have smart people or not. Any inference otherwise is just baseless and quite ignorant of any business background or facts before hand.

Also AMD has beaten Intel before and they weren't big then. Of course this doesn't guarantee they will again, but it also doesn't mean they cant again.

AMD had beaten Nvidia before performancewise. The 7970 was king for nearly 2 years till the Titan (although comparing a $1000 GPU to a MSRP $549/Sale $350 GPU is hardly rational but we are just using performance metrics) then again with the 290X although that was just for a few weeks till the 780Ti. So your blanket statement is blatantly false. And again as before it doesn't mean they will again nor does it mean it cant.

And for the record, AMD had tremendous fore-thought when they came out with GCN. In and before 2009 a DX12-like API was being considered. AMD built both Bulldozer (high core counts) and GCN because the need for higher core counts for communication to utilize this API. Unfortunately the API was scrapped but too late for either of the designs as they had already been started. Moving the industry forward is not something AMD is in lack of. Getting the industry to move forward is far more difficult and not always at th behest of the CPU/GPU manufacturers.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Zuul
like this
Ultima99 said:
I figured you guys would have fun debating this one:

AMD : Zen Competes With Intel On Performance, Specs & Features Not Just Price - Launching Later This Year
Click to expand...

There is no debate this is the piece that is taken from a John Taylor interview right ?
It says nothing and it proofs nothing ...

All of the quotes can be stretched anyway you would like. The competitive part could mean that performance wise they can compete with Intel 4 cores with Zen 8 cores. It is such an open ended story that we can only hope there is something to go on.

But before you post this find AMD executives which came out and said anything but positive remarks around launching new products. No numbers no hard dates.

Lip service ......
 
SixFootDuo said:
To give you an answer based on AMD's past performance history, their past / current R&D budget and all of the strife in between the short answer is no. These are not my words but the words from AMD. Not literally of course. Their GPU's were never ever surpass nVidia. Their CPU's will never ever surpass Intel. To obtain that level of performance and accolade takes years. Infrastructure, money. lots of money and some of the smartest people in the world. AMD has not had this in place for many years and it is doubtful they ever will.
You have to understand the whole picture. Once you do, you can answer this question yourself quite easily.
As consumers we are very lucky to have a company like nVIdia who see's the value in investing in itself. It was recently revealed that they had invested over a billion dollars into the development of Pascal. Could you imagine if we had 2 companies like AMD with all their missteps, personnel woes and lack of clarity for the future? Gaming would be no where as advanced as it is now.
Click to expand...

Isn't Radeon Pro Duo the fastest card at this moment in time ?
And for the gaming remarks you missed the boat quite clearly Mantle sprouted all of the advancements in gaming these past years and there was no Nvidia whatsoever involved.
But if you want something awesome from Nvidia I heard that the GTX1080 is twice as fast as 2 980TI SLI in VR.
 
Ambiguous marketing talk aside...

I don't see any reason why it can't be truly competitive for some time to Intel's latest and greatest.

Keller doesn't strike me as someone who'd leave the Zen project knowing it was a lame duck. And if AMD are bullshitting they're dead in the water anyway.


The overall core/thread count in direct comparisons with Intel is mostly irrelevant in my mind.

Obviously it'd be better if they could match Intel on a core for core basis - it would imply that AMD have a seriously good scalable design on their hands. After all there's no point in releasing Zen only for it to fall behind significantly in a few years.

But if does take a 6 core (with SMT) AMD Zen to match or beat something like a i7 6700K then so be it.

It's at a lower price with a similar TDP where's the issue?

The boards will likely support all the same features.

And I don't expect we'll see all that Zen can offer immediately.

I'd be interested in how the Zen parts will compare against Broadwell-E if they aim that high - maybe the rumoured 16/32 chips?


The worst scenario would be Intel announcing some radical new design (aka Pentium 4 -> Core leap) and kill the fun before it's even started.

I don't think the Haswell-E parts have aged all that well given their premium price at the time and it's not as though the Intel Core design itself is getting any younger - tick/tock tweaking aside.

If Zen succeeds hex cores might just become the new quad cores and dual cores should finally die off on desktops.
 
Last edited:
mwnn said:
If Zen succeeds hex cores might just become the new quad cores and dual cores should finally die off on desktops.
Click to expand...

With or without Zen Succeed, intel supposedly will move core count to mainstream segment, so i3 = quad core, i5= quad core +HT, i7=hexacore+HT. but nothing is sure or confirmed yet.. even if Zen Fail, intel may just throw it into the market just for marketing material..
 
Araxie said:
With or without Zen Succeed, intel supposedly will move core count to mainstream segment, so i3 = quad core, i5= quad core +HT, i7=hexacore+HT. but nothing is sure or confirmed yet.. even if Zen Fail, intel may just throw it into the market just for marketing material..
Click to expand...

Cannonlake would be the earliest possible CPU to go 6 core on a Z chipset.
 
Ultima99 said:
Cannonlake would be the earliest possible CPU to go 6 core on a Z chipset.
Click to expand...

Oh yes, sorry forgot to mention. I was almost sure was going to write "intel supposedly will move core count to mainstream segment with cannonlake" for any reason (brain fart?) Forgot to say that xD..

Anyway.. Cannonlake should be arrive on 2017 with any similar date to Zen.. so it should be fun to compare current cannonlake vs Zen..
 
Araxie said:
With or without Zen Succeed, intel supposedly will move core count to mainstream segment, so i3 = quad core, i5= quad core +HT, i7=hexacore+HT. but nothing is sure or confirmed yet.. even if Zen Fail, intel may just throw it into the market just for marketing material..
Click to expand...

People have been saying this since Haswell. Its not going to happen until people get tired of paying $250+ for an unlocked quad core.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top