AMD suggests Zen is 80 percent faster than Excavator

AMD revealed new details about its upcoming processors at a recent investor meeting.

First up AMD says its Bristol Ridge APUs will be delivered ahead of schedule. These 7th generation APUs are expected to be launched at AMD's June 1st press event. Bristol Ridge promises a 50 percent performance-per-Watt improvement versus the previous generation and AMD's marketing slide shows it performing 50% better than the Kaveri APU in Cinebench. Not bad considering it's still based on the current Excavator architecture. Bristol Ridge will introduce DDR4 support and desktops versions will use the new Socket AM4.

On the right side of the slide is some sort of performance comparison of Zen (Summit Ridge) versus the Excavator architecture. It's not labeled so I'm not sure what it's supposed to represent, it could be Cinebench scores like the Kaveri versus Bristol comparison or perhaps a more general comparison.

Either way, the slide suggests the Zen architecture will be a very big step up versus Exvacator. By counting the pixels in an image editing tool you can see the Zen bar is about 80 percent longer than the Excavator bar, a result of the 40 percent improvement in IPC combined with other architectural enhancements. There is still a lot we don't know about Zen but most rumors point to a release towards the end of the year.