My PCMR brothers need to know why Zen could be AMD's biggest leap in the CPU department in over a decade - the second coming of the Athlon 64

#Jim Keller, the creator of their legendary Athlon 64 and AMD64 designed Zen

At AMD, he created the K7 and K8 architectures in the late 90's. Jim Keller also created Apple's famous A-series chips, which were one of the "flagship" ARM chips for many years in a row. He co-authored x86-64 (AMD64), which is now powering everything, even Intel-powered PCs. In 2012, he returned to AMD to begin work on an entirely new architecture design. After finishing Zen in 2015, he switched to Tesla motors and now designs for them.

#AMD redirected focus back at per-core performance with Zen (40%+ uplift from Excavator)

Bulldozer and Bulldozer-derived architectures were known to be very bad with single-core performance, which basically made it unusable with games that only used one or two cores (12%-25% of the entire chip). Even the Phenom II, an earlier chip, beat Bulldozer in single-core workloads sometimes. AMD wrongly believed it had the power to shift the entire game and software market toward multi-threaded design when they launched this drastically new "performance through cores" Bulldozer architecture, and their chips were largely underutilized when their predictions didn't come through.

#Zen CPUs are exactly that - CPUs

Intel has been known to waste a huge portion of their CPU die on their Intel HD GPUs, which are ignored by gamers. By skipping the GPU, AMD is able to provide a faster and more powerful CPU than what Intel can provide in the same die size. That could fit more cores, more cache, or outright nothing and just use that free space to reduce the size of the chip and get better yields/prices for customers.

#AMD is shrinking the die size of Zen

Bulldozer was known to have a very large die. This was bad. It resulted in lower yields per silicon wafer, and inevitably higher cost. This meant that even if Intel and AMD both sold their chips at a $1 profit per unit, Intel's much smaller performance-equivalent chips would be able to sell for nearly 50% less.

#Zen is being build upon a silicon process that's ready, meaning lower power and better yields

Bulldozer had issues at almost every stage of the process. One well-known one was GlobalFoundries and their immature 32nm node. Their 32nm silicon had very bad yields and very high power draw early on and took at least a year to mature enough to get where it is today. Early FX-8150 buyers will remember this. The power draw was also a very large issue. This chips that would have otherwise been decently cool and decently efficient were plagued with power leakage and higher-than-expected temperatures. Zen will be using 14nm FinFET silicon, which is known to be very efficient, very compact, and much cooler. AMD is going to be at the same node as Intel for the first time in many years.

#AMD is also commissioning Samsung's world-class fabs for chip fabrication

A backup fab never hurts. If GlobalFoundries and Samsung split the workload between different lines of chips or types of products, it ensures volume can meet demand and that there's little downtime if one of the two fabs has delays or issues.

#Every variant of Zen will support DDR4 only

DDR3 is dead. No effort has been wasted on DDR3. AM4 motherboards will be 100% exclusive to DDR4.

#Zen will be under a unified socket

AM1, AM3+, and FM2+ will all be replaced by the single AM4 socket. This means there's a lot of potential for AMD to have a larger presence in the Mini ITX and Micro ATX boards, which are just as popular as ATX boards these days.

#Zen will also be gunning at the server market

This parallel focus is great for PC gamers because it means the R&D money made from the architecture also being present in servers will inevitably be fed back into future generations of the chip. It also means the architecture will be more likely to be optimized for by software developers. If Zen successfully penetrates servers, they could very well earn even more from servers than they do from general consumers.

#Intel is officially banned by the FTC from bribing manufacturers and PC makers

The famous lawsuit ended in the mid-2000s in favor of AMD: Intel will no longer punish, bribe, or otherwise pressure hardware makers, PC makers, software developers, or conference organizers for working with AMD or purchasing AMD's products.

#Intel is officially banned by the FTC from sabotaging benchmarks, games, and software with their compiler to force AMD chips to run suboptimally

http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49

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