AMD’s AM4 Platform could Launch As Early As March 2016

AMD’s AM4 Platform could Launch As Early As March 2016

 

AMD’s AM4 platform and their Zen CPUs were first expected to be coming in late 2016, but now rumors are suggesting that AMD AM4 motherboards will be coming as soon as march 2016, suggesting that AMD’s CPUs may be released much sooner than expected. 

Since AMD’s Zen architecture is completely new and that the platform is known to be using DDR4 memory these motherboards cannot come before the CPUs like AMD’s AM3+ platform, as not CPUs from previous AMD generations will be either compatible with the socket or with the memory architecture.

AMD has already released a DDR4 ready platform with Merlin Falcon, which is a Excavator based APU. It is possible that AMD may have a similar Steamroller based APU coming to the AM4 platform in March ahead of Zen, as we already know that the AM4 socket will work with AMD’s APUs and higher end 8-core Zen CPUs. 

 

  

AMD had reportedly finished testing on their new Zen CPUs core designs over a months ago, saying that the design has “Met All Expectations” with no “Significant Bottlenecks”, meaning that AMD’s Zen CPUs should be as competitive with Intel as AMD had set out to be.

The source from the real world tech forums has word from a former AMD employee, who still has connections inside to company has said that AMD is yet to finalize the clocks and TDPs of of what retail units but that the server market is “very excited” about the upcoming launch.  

AMD’s Zen CPU cores are will be to be coming in 2016 on a 14 or 16nm FinFET process and from the CPU block designs that we have seen (below) AMD will be focusing on Zen’s per core CPU performance, rather than focusing on delivering more, but limited, CPU cores than their previous Bulldozer designs. 

Rather than iterating on the AMD Bulldozer CMT design, AMD has returned to a single fetch, single decode design. This means that AMD is focusing on a single more powerful CPU in it’s CPU block rather than 2 weaker CPU parts that share resources. As we can see below AMD will be widening the Integer Pipeline of Zen by 50% compared to excavator and will be replacing the dual 128-bit Floating point schedulers with dual 256-bit schedulers, which together should allow AMD’s new cores to have dramatically better integer and floating point performance per CPU core, especially as the CPU’s Floating point units no longer feed two CPU cores. 

 

  

So far the AMD Zen CPU cores are looking a lot like the Phenom’s of the past, which fills me with a lot of excitement as I used to own an AMD Phenom II 1090T, one of the best AMD CPUs of recent years, which was sadly replaced by the rather disappointing AMD Bulldozer lineup.

AMD’s Zen CPUs will debut in 2016 with Summit Ridge, which will come with a new socket and with DDR4 support, which should hopefully bring AMD back into the races against Intel who have been rather relaxed when it comes to CPU performance improvement year on year, focusing more on mobile and other low power applications rather than increasing their IPC/ per core preformace.  

 

  

AMD’s Zen CPU designs are set to be a turning point for AMD when they release, with hope being that it will be able to bring AMD back into the CPU market with enough force to turn around their current financial situation. 

 

You can join the discussion on AMD’s Zen AM4 Platform launching in March 2016 on the OC3D Forums.