AMD Zen engineering sample outperforms 2-year old Intel Core i5 4670K

After years of waiting we finally get a glimpse of what Zen may bring to the table. An anonymous person uploaded benchmark results of two AMD Zen engineering samples to the Ashes of the Singularity benchmark database, the results have since been deleted but fortunately WCCF Tech has a copy.

The Zen engineering samples that made it into the database were eight-core models with 16 threads, they have a base clock of 2.8GHz and a 3.2GHz Turbo. While the performance of this engineering sample may not be indicative of the final performance of Zen, the results indicate Zen will indeed be quite a bit faster than AMD's current generation.

At the current clockspeeds, the Zen ES chip is 38 percent faster than the AMD FX-8350 in the Ashes of the Singularity 1080p benchmark. It's about 10 percent faster than Intel's Core i5 4670K (3.4/3.8GHz), but roughly 11 percent slower than the Core i7-4790 (3.6/4GHz). Of course, these Intel chips are over two years old but a lot will depend on how high AMD can clock its Zen chips.

The first Zen processors are expected towards the end of the year, with broad market availability planned for 2017.