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In the eternal battle to drive more details out of AMD ahead of the full launch of its new Zen microarchitecture based CPUs, today AMD is lifting the lid on some new features in order to whet the appetite (and appease the hype-train, perhaps) and that will be part of the product launch. We now have new details on the brand naming, some platform details, and a high-level overview of what will be the key points being promoted when it comes to market.
We’ve covered a lot of Zen, from the initial announcement to some of the microarchitecture details at Hot Chips through to discussing the utility of singular benchmark data and then what might be happening on the server side through a detailed analysis of motherboards on display. A lot of us want it out already, and when it does, it will come out under the brand ‘Ryzen’.
It is pronounced ‘Rye-zen’, not ‘Riz-zen’, to clarify.
As expected, there will be several SKUs in the brand, although AMD is not releasing many details aside from the cache arrangement of the 8-core, thread chip (which we already knew was 4MB of L2 + [8+8] MB of L3 victim-cache), and that the base clock for the high-end SKU will be at least 3.4+ GHz. The fact that AMD says ‘at least’ dictates that they are still deciding exactly what to do here, although a similar thing was said leading up to the launch of Polaris-based RX cards (though that’s a different department).
We know that Ryzen will use the AM4 platform, shared with the previous generation Bristol Ridge which remains an OEM-only product for now. We’ve gone into detail about how AM4 will operate, using a split IO design between the CPU and the chipset such that for minimal function, a chipset is not needed, however AMD has pointed out that with Ryzen, AM4 with the right chipset will support USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbps), NVMe SSDs, SATA-Express, and offer ‘ultimate upgradability’. The latter point may give an indication to the Ryzen based chipsets might offer numerous PCIe lanes, similar to what Intel does on the 100-series. That said, Intel has been developing that feature over years, and the Bristol Ridge chipsets for AM4 that have been announced already are not quite up to par with that, so it will be interesting to see.
Read more here. (Anandtech)
We’ve covered a lot of Zen, from the initial announcement to some of the microarchitecture details at Hot Chips through to discussing the utility of singular benchmark data and then what might be happening on the server side through a detailed analysis of motherboards on display. A lot of us want it out already, and when it does, it will come out under the brand ‘Ryzen’.
It is pronounced ‘Rye-zen’, not ‘Riz-zen’, to clarify.
As expected, there will be several SKUs in the brand, although AMD is not releasing many details aside from the cache arrangement of the 8-core, thread chip (which we already knew was 4MB of L2 + [8+8] MB of L3 victim-cache), and that the base clock for the high-end SKU will be at least 3.4+ GHz. The fact that AMD says ‘at least’ dictates that they are still deciding exactly what to do here, although a similar thing was said leading up to the launch of Polaris-based RX cards (though that’s a different department).
We know that Ryzen will use the AM4 platform, shared with the previous generation Bristol Ridge which remains an OEM-only product for now. We’ve gone into detail about how AM4 will operate, using a split IO design between the CPU and the chipset such that for minimal function, a chipset is not needed, however AMD has pointed out that with Ryzen, AM4 with the right chipset will support USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbps), NVMe SSDs, SATA-Express, and offer ‘ultimate upgradability’. The latter point may give an indication to the Ryzen based chipsets might offer numerous PCIe lanes, similar to what Intel does on the 100-series. That said, Intel has been developing that feature over years, and the Bristol Ridge chipsets for AM4 that have been announced already are not quite up to par with that, so it will be interesting to see.
Read more here. (Anandtech)
