The wait for AMD’s Zen processors will soon be over as the company has finally revealed more details about the upcoming processors, now redubbed as Ryzen.
Let’s start with the details. The Ryzen processors will be part of the Summit Ridge family of high-end desktop chips, sporting an eight-core 16-thread CPU that use simultaneous multithreading. With thte top-end processor sporting a base clock of 3.4GHz, this puts the Ryzen processor within range of Intel’s Broadwell-E processor, although it loses out to the Skylake i7-6700K with its 4GHz base clock.
On top of clock speed, Ryzen will come with a list of efficiency features that is dubbed SenseMI (Machine Intelligence). The first is “Pure Power,” which is a set of temperature, clock speed and voltage sensors that AMD promises will led to more efficient power delivery to the CPU.
From the information gleamed through “Pure Power,” the other SenseMI feature, “Precision Boost,” will take that information and use it to adjust the clock speed on-the-fly “without halts or queue drains” in small 25MHz increments.
Accompanying the above two features is “Extended Frequency Range”, a feature that AMD claims will boost the clock speed of Ryzen outside of the typical range if a user has a robust cooling system in place. As the process is entirely automated, users without any knowledge of overclocking will still be able to gain a performance boost thanks to this system.
Rounding up the SenseMI features are “Neural Net Prediction” and “Smart Prefetch”. According to AMD, Ryzen chips contain a “true artificial network” and “learning algorithms” that would allow it to predict future decisions, pre-load instructions, and learn application data access patterns in order to improve performance. This system will be paired with a 4MB L2 cache and 16MB L3 cache.
Finally, Ryzen will run on the new AM4 chipset. The chipset will feature support for DDR4 memory, PCIe Gen 3, USB 3.1 Gen 2 and NVMe storage. AMD has stated that AM4 will “run multiple processors over multiple generations,” meaning that AM4 will work, at the very least, with the successor to Ryzen. As for pricing, AMD has yet to reveal that particular piece of info.
Source: Ars Technica, Anandtech
