RussianSensation
Elite Member
- Sep 5, 2003
- 19,458
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Beating Broadwell-E clock for clock even if it's just Blender is still an amazing achievement. To design an architecture from scratch and leapfrog decades of Intel's CPU development (on an inferior process no less, with a fraction of the R&D budget) is nothing short of amazing. Many of us hoped for near Haswell IPC. Remains to be seen how it clocks and how well it does in other disciplines, but this is looking really promising.
True, esp. if 3rd party independent sources can validate AMD's benchmarks. We've seen too many times AMD's over-hyped marketing PowerPoint slides not translating into real world performance. If Zen can reach BW-E IPC in heavily multi-threaded apps, it's a huge win. It cannot be understated given Intel's R&D advantage, human capital advantage, at least 3 full/major architectural leads over Vishera in terms of IPC (Nehalem -> Sandy/Ivy -> Haswell/Broadwell) and having world's best fabs. I have no doubt that Intel will continue to have the performance lead since in 2017 they will introduce KB-X and SKL-X. Zen seems to form a nice foundation for Zen+ for AMD.
It'll be interesting to see what AMD's final CPU clock speeds will be, overclocking headroom and pricing given the 8-core competitor's products cost almost $1,100. Even if AMD doesn't outright win against the competition, the gap in pricing between a 4-core HT $350 processor and 8-core $1100 one is so vast that AMD should be able to find an attractive price/performance market segment. Hopefully the added cash flow from Zen sales allows AMD to hire even better engineers and net another 10-15% IPC improvement by 2020, while increasing CPU clocks to 4.0-4.2Ghz over the next 3 years. Competition could ensure the blue team may just be forced to bring out a 6-core HT mainstream platform offering under $400. I will still wait for final reviews and benchmarks as I have been too disappointed by BD. I still think for gamers Zen won't be a game changer but for servers/workstations and power users, it could finally be a new alternative.
Personally, I have no regrets buying a 6700K though. By the time Zen and SKL-X/KBL-X roll around in 2017, Skylake Z170 6700K platform will be almost 2 years old. In hindsight, imho, it wasn't worth waiting for either of these platforms when the alternative was enjoying cutting edge performance (and most likely for less $$$ too) all this time. I think Zen went after the lucrative server market anyway. It makes sense since that's where AMD could stand to gain the most design wins/market share.