New information coming from, in theory, an official route sheet from AMD has allowed us to see new details on AMD’s new Zen CPUs, a much waited generation that could be the revulsive that Sunnyvale’s giant needs.
Don’t get me wrong, the red giant offers an excellent price-performance ratio within its processors, but has been left far behind Intel in terms of monofilament performance and efficiency.
With this in mind we can understand why I say Zen could be, and in fact I expect to be, AMD’s “punch on the table” with which it may succeed to improve its position in the CPU sector.
Having said this, we jump to new information. The first thing is that it’ll maintain the maximum of 8 x86 cores, even though we don’t know if they’ll be complete or if they’ll keep the modular format that we’ve seen in the last generations.
Personally I expect the former, but we cannot confirm it. Secondly, it’s said that AMD will bet on efficiency and that the maximum TDP of the Zen range will be of 95W, although obviously there’ll be low-consumption solutions.
Finally it appears that Zen would come first in a variant for servers around 2016, and will later arrive in different models aimed at the general consumption sector.
Personally I’m eager to see what AMD’s new Zen architecture will be able to do, and nothing would please me more than to run into “a new Athlon 64”.