AMD’s Zen core has double the number crunching performance of Steamroller

AMD’s Zen core has double the number crunching performance of Steamroller

 

There is a lot of hype surrounding AMD’s upcoming “Zen” architecture, as it should have a massive leap in performance when compared to it’s predecessor while simultaneously consuming less power and be built using a much smaller and energy efficient FinFET process. 

AMD’s Zen architecture is said to have at least a 40% gain in performance when compared to AMD’s existing Excavator CPU cores, which themselves are two generations above AMD’s existing AM3+/ Piledriver series of Desktop CPUs, which means that on the desktop larger gains are expected. 

The “Zen” architecture is primarily focused on improving AMD’s per-core performance, which will allow AMD to better compete with Intel’s strong per-core performance and allow AMD to compete with Intel in the higher end of the market. 

  

(Image credit, “Dresdenboy“,  via 3DCenter.org)

 

3DCenter.org has reported that AMD will be doubling both the number of decoder units, ALUs and floating point units in each core of a Zen CPU, placing them on par with Intel’s current designs in terms of ALU count, AGU count and FMUL count. 

Essentially this means that all the components used in an AMD Excavator, or “Bulldozer” based 2-core module has been placed into one big CPU core, which has then been given the required components to support SMT in order to give the CPU two threads. 

When a lot of people talk about AMD’s current AM3+ CPUs you will often hear that two CPU cores from AMD are worth only one of Intel’s, so if AMD have managed to design a single core with the grunt of two previous generation cores it looks like AMD have a real competitor on their hands. 

    

One very interesting thing that we see here is that AMD’s Zen CPUs will also support an implementation of SMT, which is a very similar idea to Intel’s HyperThreading, which is another great feature for AMD’s new CPU architecture to have in it’s playbook. 

We know that AMD will be releasing Zen based processors with up to 8 cores in 2016, so it will be very interesting to see if they can perform within reach of Intel’s flagship X99 based CPUs. 

Right now with only this basic architecture information to look at we cannot make any real claims as to what kind of performance that AMD’s Zen CPUs will posses. Hopefully it will be enough to allow AMD to become a real market competitor again, but that reaming to be seen. 

 

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