[News] AMD Zen Engineering samples are floating around, specs leak online

[Sparky]

Plus, people hear "intel is better" (even back when they weren't).

....then they go buy a Celeron

[Ket]

I love this meme, false narrative that it is.

I realize we are *Extreme* but for 98.7% of computer users, their significant utilization is *CPU Idle*

Even the "Intel is 60% faster" in context is ridiculous. Yeah. It will save you 7/10ths of a second --- 1.7s v. 2.5s in Photoshop

OMG!

What kind of nonsensical reply is that? If you had paused for a moment you would of quickly realised it was primarily gaming performance being talked about, AMD gets slaughtered. Look HERE. GTA5: 6700k 146FPS average, 132FPS minimum, 8350: 81\72. Overwatch: 6700k 239\195, 8350: 144\101. So there you have it, no AMD can't compete at enthusiast level right now, hopefully Zen will change that. As you bought up Photoshop though lets have a look at that too, 6700k: 15.1 seconds, 8350: 20.7 seconds. To the normal user thats fine, but to anyone who has to work with Photoshop a lot, its a big difference.

If you want something more comprehensive just have a look HERE the 8370 is handily beaten in most tests, the results are of course subjective to what the primary use of the system is, but faster is always better. Theres a few more gaming benchmarks too and if we look at those we see a FX8370 is languishing pretty badly with its frametimes, considering most true PC gamers have at least a 120hz monitor and a powerful enough GPU(s) for the silky experience they want its just another nail in the coffin of current AMD CPUs.

[zanzabar]

opposite with what i learned in various reviews

at the time intel only had 6 core cpus for the most part with 8 cores coming a bit later on 4p system. they also capped at about 2ghz and used about 100W but amd had 2.5ghz 12 cores with 80W and half the cost. they used less power and were faster for cluster and bulk VM work. remember this was right when cloud services took off and it was before the 32nm intel chips that destroyed amd.

[AliG]

Yeah but those were BD "cores", so in reality 6 modules. The 8 core intel chips were more powerful at the same clocks.

[zanzabar]

Yeah but those were BD "cores", so in reality 6 modules. The 8 core intel chips were more powerful at the same clocks.

those were 2 thulbans stuck together. the BD version of g34 came in 16 core and was slower than the 1st gen of it.

[haylui]

I don't think Zen's single-core performance is within 20% of current Intel's offering.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/1028

Cinebench R15 single-thread performance:
i7 6700 (4.0GHz @ Single-thread): 173
Athlonx4 845 (3.8GHz @ Single-thread): 92
Supposed Zen @ 3.8GHz: 129 (1.4 * 92)

It's not even close.

8320E is 3.2GHz and it is faster than Athlon X4 845 (3.5GHz in anandteh) so there are some other factors that makes the excavator design perform worse than piledriver in this application.

[vario]

8320E is 3.2GHz and it is faster than Athlon X4 845 (3.5GHz in anandteh) so there are some other factors that makes the excavator design perform worse than piledriver in this application.

Its hard to quantify performance differences between PD XV because of the different platforms cache sizes and lack of L3 on XV.AMD must know that.So, they are mudding the waters here probably on purpose because they dont know the final clocks yet.Also general idea of "40% more" is probably false, as in some ways even BD was fast and still is.Just give me vanilla haswell performance per clock and i will be happy.But it needs to do 4ghz or more.
Pessimistic view here is, it coud be 40% faster then the current XV per clock and 3.2ghz is the final clock.That way its almost the same :P.But i really think that they are aiming at 4ghz chips and IPC boost is going to be between 0 and 100% depending on the work.Lets also remember ,bigger L2, big L3 and DDR4.
Im confident they have good architecture.But thing is, they can get screwed by some bugs or manufacturing process.And thats very probable.

[haylui]

Its hard to quantify performance differences between PD XV because of the different platforms cache sizes and lack of L3 on XV.AMD must know that.So, they are mudding the waters here probably on purpose because they dont know the final clocks yet.Also general idea of "40% more" is probably false, as in some ways even BD was fast and still is.Just give me vanilla haswell performance per clock and i will be happy.But it needs to do 4ghz or more.
Pessimistic view here is, it coud be 40% faster then the current XV per clock and 3.2ghz is the final clock.That way its almost the same :P.But i really think that they are aiming at 4ghz chips and IPC boost is going to be between 0 and 100% depending on the work.Lets also remember ,bigger L2, big L3 and DDR4.
Im confident they have good architecture.But thing is, they can get screwed by some bugs or manufacturing process.And thats very probable.

I am not the one who compared like this. I was replying the other comment. I know different cache in L2 and L3 surely affect the result by much hence it is hard to compare XV * 140% = Zen IPC

It is hard for AMD to fine tune the manufacturing process since they do not have fab to call their own now.