In January 2017 it looks like AMD will finally release their brand new clean-sheet (it's a new design) Zen CPU architecture, and damn it sounds exciting. Thanks to WCCFTech for the info here.
As a hardware enthusiast myself, I am terribly excited. I have two AMD CPU's in my house powering various things due to their great price. The problem has been performance, AMD just doesn't match up with Intel usually.
That looks like it may truly change with Zen.
They actually did a demonstration back in August that I completely missed. It shows two top-end processors, one from Intel and Zen from AMD competing head to head:
The Blender speed test was impressive, since Zen just about finished first. Considering they had identical clock speeds, cores and threads that's quite amazing for AMD.
Looks like the weather is about to change for AMD, and I'm pretty excited. If they actually turn out anything like I hope, I will likely pick one up for something.
For the performance "enthusiast" market will be "AMD Summit Ridge" which seems to boast up to 8 cores, where as the lower end "AMD Raven Ridge" APU's will have up to 4 cores.
The main thing AMD Zen is focusing on is stronger performance, while still keeping the power draw quite low. They have ditched their own "clustered multi-threading" (CMT) and gone with "simultaneous multi-threading" (SMT) which is what Intel use.
AMD Zen will have much stronger single threaded performance, which will be especially good for us gamers. Along with SMT, the single thread performance increase is going to be rather welcome.
I've seen a lot of complaints about performance with AMD CPU's in some of the ports we've had over the past year, so hopefully in a year or two that will be a thing of the past, or at least, not as bad as it can be now.
Apparently AMD Gray Hawk (Zen+) will release sometime in 2019. That's a decently aggressive schedule! If Zen is actually this good, then Zen+ coming out so soon after can only be a good thing for all of us.
Will you be picking up and AMD Zen processor? Let me know what you're thinking in our comments. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
As a hardware enthusiast myself, I am terribly excited. I have two AMD CPU's in my house powering various things due to their great price. The problem has been performance, AMD just doesn't match up with Intel usually.
That looks like it may truly change with Zen.
They actually did a demonstration back in August that I completely missed. It shows two top-end processors, one from Intel and Zen from AMD competing head to head:
YouTube videos require cookies, you must accept their cookies to view. View cookie preferences.
Direct Link
Direct Link
Looks like the weather is about to change for AMD, and I'm pretty excited. If they actually turn out anything like I hope, I will likely pick one up for something.
For the performance "enthusiast" market will be "AMD Summit Ridge" which seems to boast up to 8 cores, where as the lower end "AMD Raven Ridge" APU's will have up to 4 cores.
The main thing AMD Zen is focusing on is stronger performance, while still keeping the power draw quite low. They have ditched their own "clustered multi-threading" (CMT) and gone with "simultaneous multi-threading" (SMT) which is what Intel use.
AMD Zen will have much stronger single threaded performance, which will be especially good for us gamers. Along with SMT, the single thread performance increase is going to be rather welcome.
I've seen a lot of complaints about performance with AMD CPU's in some of the ports we've had over the past year, so hopefully in a year or two that will be a thing of the past, or at least, not as bad as it can be now.
Apparently AMD Gray Hawk (Zen+) will release sometime in 2019. That's a decently aggressive schedule! If Zen is actually this good, then Zen+ coming out so soon after can only be a good thing for all of us.
Will you be picking up and AMD Zen processor? Let me know what you're thinking in our comments. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
0 Likes
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
The comments on this article are closed.
Is buying a CPU only a good idea given the APU 4 core will most likely be enough for gaming at QHD/4k with Vulkan ? I have been running an APU as a CPU + dedicated card but i wonder if with FOSS AMD drivers we will see interesting APU+Dedicated crossfire support giving much more performance than just CPU+GPU alone ?
Other than that, i can't wait for this. Either way my next Linux rig is AMD+AMD. Not AMD+Nvidia, nvidia just aren't going to be as competitive as AMD on Linux going forward ( can't believe it's possible to type that )
Other than that, i can't wait for this. Either way my next Linux rig is AMD+AMD. Not AMD+Nvidia, nvidia just aren't going to be as competitive as AMD on Linux going forward ( can't believe it's possible to type that )
0 Likes
Quoting: lejimsterI just built a new system for my mom and had to go intel for that very reason, the AMD chipset were lagging behind and I wasn't in a place to wait for the new stuff. I ended up getting her an Intel G4400 (dual core) with 8GB DDR4 and a 128gb SM951 m.2 drive.
If you haven't got a gaming mom, her PC can be so nice and quite and clean and cheap nowadays...!
I've built one for my mother-in-law: G3900 dual core, 4 GB RAM, 250 GB SSD. And Debian.
0 Likes
I'm looking forward to these! Too bad I'll also need a new mainboard, cooler, and possibly RAM...
0 Likes
Yes, I'm definitely going to upgrade to Zen at some point! My 8320 has been working pretty well all things considered.
0 Likes
Quoting: GuestActually the memory bandwidth will likely be the bottleneck as APUs may still only use dual-channel memory controllers.Quoting: meggermanIs buying a CPU only a good idea given the APU 4 core will most likely be enough for gaming at QHD/4k with Vulkan ? I have been running an APU as a CPU + dedicated card but i wonder if with FOSS AMD drivers we will see interesting APU+Dedicated crossfire support giving much more performance than just CPU+GPU alone ?
Other than that, i can't wait for this. Either way my next Linux rig is AMD+AMD. Not AMD+Nvidia, nvidia just aren't going to be as competitive as AMD on Linux going forward ( can't believe it's possible to type that )
Just to clarify: Vulkan won't make the GPU component of an APU much better really. The graphics hardware itself will likely be a bottleneck, not the CPU side of things. My guess is that any integrated graphics solution in the short term will have trouble at 4k.
Last edited by Soul_Est on 16 October 2016 at 2:33 am UTC
0 Likes
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me