Every great arena has its rivals. Whether it is the PlayStation vs the Xbox, PC vs Mac or Android vs iPhone. For the battle of the chipsets, the two most formidable rivals are Intel and AMD. And for quite some time now, Intel has been pulling the lead in terms of performance and sales. AMD has been slowly catching up, and it now aims to surpass the Intel standard with its brand new processor – the Zen.
Zen is based on the latest 14nm FinFET node. The Zen core will feature 40% more instructions per clock compared to its predecessor, Excavator.
The Zen promises a 40 percent increase in performance from its predecessor, the Excavator. It took the designers four years to come up with the direction to take for the Zen, in order to make it more powerful and more efficient at the same time.
The Zen and Excavator aren’t the run of the mill CPUs one would find on just any computer. These are industrial grade CPUs that power workstations and servers. The newer chips will come equipped with eight to 32 cores. The new system architecture on the processors will run two threads per core. The L2 cache will be shortened to 512KB, in turn increasing the size of the L3 cache to around 8MB.
This will contribute to the higher performance as well will be the more dynamic floating point processing units for single and multi-threaded workloads. It simply means better efficiency for heavier workloads.
AMD seems to be pushing the edge of its new processor’s capabilities, and if it releases this right, it could well out-perform and outsell its competitor, by a pretty long margin.
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