Rounding up the press conference at COMPUTEX, AMD has decided to tease us all with the presence of the Zen processor.
First reported to be taped out in January, the ‘Summit Ridge’ CPU that was shown off at the press conference is an 8-core, 16 thread Zen-based CPU that will be utilising AMD’s new AM4 socket, the same socket that the Bristol Ridge will be using.
Details on Summit Ridge and Zen are scarce, but what AMD did reveal shows that the chip will deliver 40% more Instructions per Cycle (IPC). While the chip itself won’t be going into the commercial market quite yet, AMD has stated that it will be passing along some engineering samples to the company’s ‘top tier, high profile customers’ within the coming weeks. A wider sampling to their OEM base is expected to take place in the third quarter of the year.
As for the future of Zen, AMD has stated that Zen will be the basis of a range of products for AMD such as desktop CPUs as well as its 8th generation APU. Server products and embedded products will also be receiving Zen further down the line.
