Introducing AMD Zen Microarchitecture

AMD made several announcements on Dec 13, 2016 regarding its next generation desktop family of CPUs based on the Zen microarchitecture.

AMD’s big Zen preview event “New Horizon” was full of extremely impressive performance demonstrations.

President and CEO Lisa Su took the stage to wow the audience with one demo after the other, showcasing what Zen is truly capable of in a wide range of applications from gaming to streaming, rendering and video transcoding.

The new family of desktop Zen CPUs code named “Summit Ridge” will officially debut under the RYZEN brand.

RYZEN CPUs will officially launch in the first quarter of next year, before April 2017. 
RYZEN CPUs will feature up to 8 Zen cores and are capable of executing up to 16 threads simulatneously.
All RYZEN CPUs will feature a base clock of 3.4Ghz or higher at launch.
The 8 core, 16 thread RYZEN CPU has a TDP of 95 watts, 45 watts less than its direct Intel competitor.
The 8 core, 16 thread RYZEN CPU competes with Intel’s fastest 8 core 16 thread offering, the $1199 Broadwell-E Core-i7 6900K, in terms of features and performance and exceeds it in power efficiency.

RYZEN CPUs automatically overclock themselves to deliver the highest possible clock speed attainable under any cooling condition, Including LN2, liquid and air cooling.
RYZEN CPUs have hundreds of integrated sensors that monitor a plethora of parameters from temperatures to voltages and cache traffic.
RYZEN CPUs have a sophisticated AI framework, making them capable of learning on the fly via a built-in neural net that self-trains and adapts to different applications and sets of code.

RYZEN CPUs will be compatible with AMD’s next generation AM4 desktop platform.

The AM4 paltform features DDR4 memory support, PCIE Gen 3, USB 3.1 Gen 2, NVMe and SATA Express.

AMD X370 is the chipset for overclockers and tweakers who need robust platforms. This chip provides the ultimate low-level control to its users and delivers ultimate graphics card bandwidth. By bandwidth, AMD is referring to max PCI-Express lanes as this is the only chip in the stack that supports multi-GPU functionality. The chipset supports both, CFX (CrossFire) and SLI.

Its brand new clean-slate core design has been headed from the get-go by accomplished CPU architect Jim Keller. The very same man who brought us the original Athlon XP and the very first 64-bit x86 CPU, the Athlon64. Both were and remain the most successful and most competitive CPUs in the history of the company.

It’s without a doubt that Zen is AMD’s biggest long-term technology bet and one of the largest engineering efforts undertaken by it to date. It’s the company’s first ever CPU microarchitecture to feature simultaneous multithreading. It’s built on a process technology that’s as close as ever to parity with Intel since the days of the original Athlon in the early 2000s. It means that for the very first time in a decade AMD’s CPUs won’t be at an inherent disadvantage to Intel’s process lead.

Below is the complete AMD RYZEN "Summit Ridge" tech-briefing from the AMD Tech Summit held at Sonoma, California from Dec 7-9, 2016.

RYZEN & VEGA In Action–Playing Star Wars : Battlefront In 4K

Finally, we come to our very last performance demo and the only one involving the company’s upcoming ultra enthusiast Radeon graphics card featuring the VEGA architecture. Here a system equipped with RYZEN and a single VEGA graphics card was showcased running Star Wars Battlefront in 4K at 60+ frames per second.