Zen almost revealed...

There’s a stream tonight (UK time) where AMD will officially talk about Zen. Or if you can’t wait until then someone leaked the slides: http://videocardz.com/64741/ryzen

Ryzen Q1 2017
8 core, 16 thread
3.4 GHz+ with XFR (looks like more aggressive turbo boost like GPUs do to maximise work for cooling conditions)
20MB L2+L3 cache (512kB L2 + 2MB L3 per core?, recognising it may be different type than Intel)

Let’s see how much this will cost…

Looks like a great future purchase if the wallet will extend to it :slight_smile:

Take away point from the video, for those that haven’t seen it and can’t be bothered, is that Ryzen fixed at 3.4 GHz was equal to an i7-6900k at stock in the AMD supplied Blender render file. They also showed a Handbrake test which showed Ryzen a bit faster.

They released the Blender file to allow anyone to run it, but with a mistake in one setting so times didn’t match up. Still, I tried to characterise Blender itself to see what performance it represents. Doesn’t seem sensitive to ram performance. Big bonus from HT on order of 50%. Doesn’t seem to use AVX. Each step from Haswell to Broadwell, then to Skylake, gains about 3% IPC. So, not really a heavy load like Prime95. I intend to test relative power usage of Blender on the weekend.