AMD Briefly Shows Off Zen “Summit Ridge” Silicon
by Ryan Smith on May 31, 2016 11:15 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Zen
- Computex_2016
- AM4
After an already packed Computex 2016 event with Radeon Polaris and Bristol Ridge/Stoney Ridge news, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su had one final surprise to close out the company’s presentation: Zen, in the flesh.
Zen taped out earlier this year, and AMD is now working on bringing it up in their labs. To that end Dr. Su pulled out a very early engineering sample of what will be AMD’s Summit Ridge CPU, an 8 core Zen-based CPU. Summit Ridge will use AMD’s new AM4 socket – currently being rolled out for Bristol Ridge – making it a drop-in platform replacement.
Little in the way of new details on Summit Ridge and Zen were released, but Dr. Su confirmed that AMD is still targeting a 40% IPC increase. On the development front, the chip still has some work to undergo, but AMD is to the point where they are going to start sampling their top-tier, high profile customers with engineering samples here in a few weeks. Wider sampling to their larger OEM base will in turn take place in Q3 of this year. AMD has not mentioned a retail product date, but keep in mind there’s a fairly significant lag time between OEM sampling and retail products.
Finally, Dr. Su also reiterated that Zen will be the basis of a range of products for AMD. Along with the desktop CPU, AMD will be using Zen as the basis of their next, 8th generation APU. And further down the line it will be appearing in server products and embedded products as well.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
89 Comments
View All Comments
Eden-K121D - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
If it has 5960X performance at 400$ it will be a killer combo with Vega 10 that would hopefully arrive in October.But Take a heavy pinch of salt whenever talking about Zendragonsqrrl - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
If it's performance competitive with the 5960X it probably won't be priced at $400. It'll probably be priced between the closest competing Broadwell-E SKUs (6900K-6850K).nathanddrews - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
This. If AMD can justify a competitive price, they will do so. They won't just sell a Skylake-level 8C16T CPU for $400 if they can sell them for $1,500/ea to a server farm or to enthusiasts.Then again... the 295X2 sold for $1,500 when the Titan Z was $3,000, despite the 295X2 being the better card overall. Too bad we'll have to wait until 2017, after Kaby Lake is out, to see Zen IRL.
SeanJ76 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
AMD has never been competitive......acme64 - Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - link
you got a short term memorysc14s - Thursday, June 9, 2016 - link
err they actually used to be competitive not all that long ago all things considered. Though I guess its ancient times by tech standardsredraider89 - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
No, you just have never been paying attention to what's going on.sharath.naik - Saturday, July 9, 2016 - link
AMD only mentions IPC and never mentioned peak performance. By AMD standards that means only one thing. It will be a RX480 style release. Its top cpu will be a power efficient competitor to the lower end chips from Intel. Likely running at 2.4 ghz max.Or simply matching their current cpus just in a lower power package. Nothing in their GPU manufacturing example shows otherwise.
Shadow7037932 - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Yup. AMD needs to do what Intel did with Conroe. When the E6300 came out, it was around $330-350 and beat the FX 62 in almost everything. The FX 62 at the time was something like $800+.III-V - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
I'm calling wood screws on this.Just kidding.