AMD claims Zen has 40% IPC increase over Excavator

AMD discussed its next-generation processors at today's Financial Analyst Day. One of the things the company stressed is that the upcoming 2016 Zen design promises a significant boost in instructions per clock (IPC), aMD claims Zen will be able to handle 40 percent more instructions per clock than the current Excavator design.

The slides confirm Zen offers a new core design with support for simultaneous multithreading (SMT), which is somewhat similar to Intel's HyperThreading. Zen has a new high-bandwidth low-latency cache system and will be made on a 14nm FinFET process.



It will be interesting to see if AMD can keep its promise this time. A 40 percent higher IPC combined with higher frequencies could deliver a pretty big boost in performance versus the current generation, but the availability of these chips is still quite some time away from us. The slide also mentions plans for Zen+ cores after 2016 with more modest increases in IPC efficiency.



The Zen-based FX-series (which seems to lack integrated graphics) and the 7th generation A-series desktop APUs will share the same platform, which will be the new Socket AM4. In the laptop market, AMD will offers its 7th gen A-series mobile APUs, these will use the FP4 socket.



Source: Tweakers