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AMD will showcase its Zen CPU to the public on December 13th

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AMD announced that it will give an exclusive advance preview of its new “Zen” CPU on December 13th, during the New Horizon event. In this event, eSports & Evil Geniuses PPD will put “Zen” through its paces.

AMD’s Zen CPU is currently planned for a Q1 2017 launch, and this will be the first time the public will be able to try the Zen CPU themselves and see its capabilities.

Those interested can visit AMD’s website and sign up for the livestream.

It’s worth noting that this event will be hosted by Geoff Keighley, and that there will be appearances from special guests.

Here is hoping that the Zen CPU will be able to compete with Intel’s latest CPUs. After all, competition is always a good thing for consumers!

59 thoughts on “AMD will showcase its Zen CPU to the public on December 13th”

    2. Lol. I can attest Zen is AMD’s next architecture. Been following it for a few years. It sounds much more exciting than Bulldozer did. Going to be cheaper than Intels 8 core parts with ~45w less and the potential to have just a tad bit less performance at less than half the cost of intel ($500 vs $1200) if recent leaks are accurate. However the only demo so far was in a test with blender that showed an 8 core intel (6900 IIRC) @ 3.0 Ghz and 8 core zen @ 3.0 Ghz with Zen 2% faster. Long story short the architecture actually uses what Intel has been using for years, similar core design and instruction sets and even Hyperthreading (I forget what AMD named theirs, but its all derived from SMT). It has the potential to effectively be optimized for whatever Intel is optimized for. However we need third party benchmarks to verify its performance, obviously.

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    1. Intel CPUs are very fast and amd can’t compete at the moment but you could at least try the new line besides do you know how much you would have to fork out for intel if AMD was not there haha ? You got to go for the underdog sometimes besides if AMD delivers I won’t have to change a socket in 2 months to upgrade CPU because well is not Intel!

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      1. I already have i7 (something something) won’t need to upgrade my CPU for another few years. Not really interested in AMD because of the shorter lifespan their CPU’s have. Im a longer term investment type of guy. :p

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        1. Actually current FX based on piledriver are pretty good at games, especially after DX12 is out, they can compete very well with i7s in new API for lower price and also worse TDP. Piledriver IPC though is almost half of what intel have atm, so twice as many cores will help you only when new APIs get into consideration.

          Zen should be 50% faster than piledriver on bit lower frequency, so about 40% above current FX. It is not intel IPC (importance of IPC getting lower / importance of number of cores is getting higher), but it is still 16 threads capable CPU, probably twice as fast than best what AMD has today and with good price point ZEN might be GREAT competitor, especially mainstream 4core+SMT/8corew/oSMT. They could do huge sales with ZEN.

          And also it is competition which is so important today, after intel did bring very little performance improvements in generations.

          The fact is everyone need AMD, whether you like it or not.

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          1. Piledriver user here. I disagree, even in DX12 it see’s bottlenecks compared to an I7 due to the low IPC (core performance ELI5) compared to its intel counterpart.

          2. Bottlenecks, sure. But nothing that prevents you from getting a solid 60 fps in games with maximum settings. What’s the point of more power? It’s a waste in my opinion, which is why I’m still rocking my piledriver after so many years.

          3. There are plenty that can prevent you from getting a solid 60 fps throughout gameplay, one of those is single threaded renderers. The thing about bulldozers performance, for its price, wasn’t that it was overall a weak chip, its that software couldn’t utilize it properly. Hector Ruiz ordered Bulldozer to be built for multithreaded applications and it does fairly well with them, however the vast majority of software is single threaded.

          5. DX12 is already out and the result are not really that encouraging. also not every games coming out in the future will be DX12. some triple A maybe but the vast majority of games will stick with DX11 or even DX9

        2. So you would rather change the whole socket over and over for every upgrade that is all I’m saying for every new series Intel releases there is a new socket and performance wise they are unbeatable but when it comes to performance improvement from socket to sockeT what shorter lifespan? How? You got to really overclock those chips to like insane frequencies in order to produce heat! For it to limit the lifespan

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  3. Competition is always a good thing, it’s why Nvidia have been beaten to the punch by AMD so many times that their GPU’s are so cheap /s.

    I’ll wait to see what they give out, but I’m not expecting a CPU that beats all of Intel’s and is super cheap to boot. In fact I can’t recall a time where something on this planet was really powerful and yet cheap for practically everyone to buy.

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      1. I’m riding it all the way home. Let’s hope it’s not a disappointment. Even if it competes with the i5 processors, it will be a big change.

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      1. Well yeah, and rightfully so. That’s the biggest “sod off” to anyone not using that one OS. THere are plenty out there sporting 7-8 and Linux as well as Mac, but two mainline brands just supporting only 10 onwards?, that’s just bullish and insane, not to mention highly anti consumer.

        I want at least 3 options, not one, not just Windows 10, sod that, sod that straight to hell.

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        1. New versions of Linux and Mac are supported. Only old systems aren’t supported. So for example you can’t use MacOS 10.9, Ubuntu 14, Windows 8.1. But you can use Ubuntu 16, Windows 10, MacOS 10.12. Only current version of each OS are supported.

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      2. But that;s the whole point why you need to drop the old support. How are you supposed to advance if you need to also allow for the use of old architectures?

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        1. Some people don’t want use newest version of system. For example many Ubuntu users use Ubuntu 11 because that was last version without integrated ads from Amazon. They can’t buy Zen or Kaby Lake without upgrade to Ubuntu 16. There are also many users with old version of Windows who don’t like Windows 10 etc.

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          1. Oh yes I completely understand, but if you are using an outdated system e.g. Ubuntu 11 or windows xp they will not have full support for new introduction sets or optimisation of current CPU’s already. Old systems work better on old hardware which they can utilise. X86 has not changed that much in last 30 years what got better is the transistor count but not the actual inner workings because of backwards compatibility.
            I want to see a huge leap in processors and sadly this would mean dropping some legacy support.

      3. You mean to say many people will buy Windows 10 because of that?

        Because it says ‘Intel’s Kaby Lake and AMD’s Zen processors will only support Windows 10’, not ‘Only Intel’s Kaby Lake and AMD’s Zen processors will support Windows 10’.

        Or am I missing something here?

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  7. You know when you take a fat dump and you flush it down and after a second you turn around and still see one turd floating around? Reading you post reminds of that some reason.

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  8. Every few years I cross my fingers and hope not to be let down.
    Let’s all say the prayer.
    Dear Lord Yahweh, Please bring serious competition back to the X86 market before all CPUs are made by Qualcomm.

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    1. Me too, don’t want to go back to $800-1000 CPU’s, no competition, no reasonable prices. Funny how they still make money when the CPUS are half the price of what they want to charge.

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  13. Esports aren’t exactly the most strenuous of CPU tests (by that measure the FX8000 series would be considered ‘good’) and, reading between the lines, it looks like that’s what we are going to see the CPUs tested in.

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    1. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Esports = unlimited framerate and low graphics settings. There is no better way to test the true GAMING capability of a CPU.

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      1. I would have thought almost any odd CPU from the last few years (i.e. anything that isn’t an AMD product because they’ve not had new ones for a while) would have no trouble running 200fps+ in eSports.

        Can you give me an idea of what kind of fps target athletes like to hit? And the processor they might use to do that (which will effectively be Zen’s rival for the purpose of the upcoming comparison).

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        1. 1. There is no “target”. More is better.
          2. I don’t think you can run Overwatch at hundreds of frames on older or weaker CPUs.
          3. They will use the most expensive CPU they can afford. Not just to get the best possible performance ingame but also because most “esports” people are now streamers and streaming takes a toll on your hardware as well.

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          1. 1. Yeah, makes sense. Higher the fps lower the input latency.
            2. I actually don’t know, which is what piqued my curiosity.
            3. I was under the impression eSports athletes had their gear provided for them under sponsorships.

          2. Regarding 3: rapha (best Quake player) has used a WMO (microsoft mouse) with a razer sticker on it at tournaments in the past. Point being, pros will SAY they are using products of the companies currently sponsoring them. But really, they’ll use whatever works best for them.

          3. Wow, I had no idea that kind of thing happened. The sponsor would throw a fit if that was outed in any other sport.

          4. I’m pretty sure the shoes pro football players wear are custom fit for the player as well. Where it really matters equipment is selected for performance. Why would the sponsor care as long as their logo is on everything and the audience remembers it the next time they’re in a store?

  15. Fingers crossed for a Zen variant with 4 cores optimized for individual core performance.

    “Actually, it’s all about MOAR CORES XD” ~ AMD

    NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO *wakes up sweating*

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