AMD Next-Gen Zen Processors To Release In January: A Worthy Adversary Of Intel?

AMD is set to release its next-generation Zen processors early next year. This could prove to be a real challenge for its rival Intel, according to reports.

AMD is considered to be Intel's only significant rival in the production of microprocessors. AMD is considered the second option and does not pose a real threat to Intel, not until AMD's Zen architecture was introduced.

AMD's latest presentation of Zen held last August during the Intel Developer Forum convention in San Francisco featuring their very first Zen-based product called the Summit Ridge. Part of the presentation showcased a head to head comparison between AMD's Summit Ridge and Intel's Core I7 6900k "down-clocked processor and the results show that AMD's Summit Ridge is slightly faster than Intel's latest processor core, based on an article in Digital Trends.

Developed under the three principles of performance, throughput, and efficiency, AMD's Zen is a totally new product that offers simultaneous multi-threading, a high bandwidth low latency cache system, a high-performance core design, and energy efficiency. Compared to AMD's previous chips, the Zen features improvement in its core engine with larger instruction schedulers, larger retire 8 ops vs 4 ops, larger retire queue, larger load queue and larger store queue.

AMD's new architecture also has a better cache system with a faster L2 and L3 cache, a 7 vs 9 cycles which mean a faster load to FPU and a total L3 bandwidth up 5x. Power consumption was also improved with an aggressive clock gating with multi-level regions, power focus from project inception, and a large Op cache. AMD's improved features boast a 40 percent performance uplift, according to ars TECHNICA.

AMD's latest innovation is truly a monster waiting to be unleashed and may prove to become Intel's greatest threat. Given that AMD's next generation of core processors costs only a fraction of Intel's latest processors. If the rumored 2017 launch is confirmed, consumers may witness a significant drop in core processor market.