AMD Reveals More Zen CPU Details, Officially Known As Ryzen, No Linux Details Yet
Here are my highlights, check back for updates.
- They have "met or exceeded" their goals at AMD for Zen. Beating performance goals of 40%+ instruction per clock improvement.
- AMD's Zen desktop "Summit Ridge" processors are indeed named Ryzen.
- AMD Ryzen processors will be out in Q1'2017. The Ryzen CPUs will have 8 cores, 16 threads via SMT, and the highest-end Ryzen Summit Ridge CPU will have a 3.4GHz clock speed or above. There will be a 4MB L2 cache and 16MB L3 cache. Boost clock speeds are not yet revealed for these AM4 CPUs.
- AMD Zen server processors will be out in Q2'2017 while the notebook APU (Raven Ridge) isn't coming until the second half of the year.
- AMD claims the 3.4+ GHz Ryzen can run slightly faster than a Core i7 6900K while having lower power consumption (95 Watt TDP of the Ryzen part shown during the demo).
- AMD SenseMI technology includes "true machine intelligence" and smart prefetch with Ryzen. There are also "Precision Boost" and "Pure Power" features. (I would anticipate there would be some OS integration needed, haven't seen any Linux kernel patches in this area yet for Zen.)
No mention yet of Linux during the presentation. But at least they are using some open-source apps for demonstration like Handbrake and Blender, albeit from Windows 10. While we have seen some more Zen patches queued up for Linux 4.10, we haven't yet seen any patches yet about the "SenseMI" features for Linux (particularly concerned about boosting and the power-savings functionality under Linux given no patches there yet that I've seen), working to get some comment from AMD about that for getting a better idea for the Linux support of Ryzen at launch come next quarter.
Update: The event is over. No mention of Linux, but Ryzen looks super exciting anyhow, assuming it will play nicely on Linux. Stay tuned for AMD Ryzen benchmarks on Linux at launch in Q1.
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