AMD Zen engineering sample details leak, launch in February 2017?

An anonymous poster at the AnandTech forums, who previously leaked some accurate details about the AMD Zen engeering samples, wrote an update about the latest Zen A0 revision engineering samples.

According to the leak, there are two new AMD Zen engineering samples in the wild:

One 8-core model with a 3.15GHz base clock, 3.3GHz all-core Turbo, and 3.6GHz maximum Turbo for one core. This part has a 95W TDP.

The second sample is a quad-core model with 2.9GHz base frequency, 3.1GHz all-core Turbo, and max single-core Turbo of 3.4GHz. This version has a 65W TDP.

Furthermore, the source claims AM4 retail motherboards are in production and adds that Zen will likely launch in February 2017, which is a bit later than previously expected. Performance-wise the Zen chips are decribed as being around the same level as the Intel Haswell and Broadwell architecture, but not as fast as Skylake on a clock-for-clock basis.

Here's his (or her) message in full:

Hi all! I went into the forest recently and birds have tweeted something again. They spoke about 2 new SKUs that have just hit the post-boxes of the mainboard manufacturers. They are both A0 revisions and Engineering Samples, so there is no improvement since my last post.

The first one is an 8-core design with AMD's HT implementation and it's got a 3150 MHz base clock, it's all-core turbo is 3300 MHz and the max turbo for 1 core is 3600 Mhz. Yes, here are some improvements regarding the previous 8-core SKU under the same TDP envelope.

The second SKU is a 4-core one with AMD's HT. It's got a 65W TDP and the base clock is still 2900 MHz. All-core turbo is 3100 MHz, max turbo is 3400 MHz. I don't know if it's only an SKU for testing mainboards or something is not okay with the clock-wattage correlation. I mean on higher clocks the 4-core SKU steps into the 95W TDP envelope, AMD can't keep the wattage low. Maybe GloFo's 14nm process needs some maturing... Frankly I don't have a clue what's in the background.

Retail AM4 mainboards are under production. The whole platform will be ready to have a paper-launch at the end of the year with a real availability in February of 2017. Performance wise the Zen uarch will be around Haswell and Broadwell (except for FMA), it seems it won't catch Skylake clock for clock. It's not a big deal, but if the clocks can't go higher until the start it won't fulfill the expectations. And we all know that expectations in this case are very high...

As always, take these rumors with a grain of salt as we can't vouch for the accuracy.

Via eTeknix