AMD's Zen to support 32 cores and 8-channel memory

AMD lost the performance wars to Intel and hasn’t been able to catch up since the release of Intel’s Core architecture. After years of lurking in the background, AMD has decided to finally win back the performance crown. Their contender? The AMD Zen architecture. Little is known of the new platform other than AMD’s claims to improve their IPC by 40%. IPC stands for Instructions Per Clock, a new standard for performance that’s being pushed in CPU circles. A 40% improvement will in itself be a great achievement, but AMD might be upping the ante a bit further. A leaked slide from a presentation at CERN seems to suggest that the new Zen architecture will be capable of hosting 32 CPU cores and support 8-channel of DDR4 memory, says TechReport. Apparently, the design will feature two blocks of 16-cores, communicating via an on-die interconnect. AMD also plans to (finally) introduce their version of hyper-threading (christened symmetrical hyper-threading). The processors will be manufactured using a FinFET technology, a type of 3D transistor using a 14nm or 16nm process. Whether this will be enough to counter Intel’s lead in the CPU performance space, we don’t know. But we are excited to see AMD at least trying to challenge Intel in the performance space. That said, unless Zen gives a good showing for itself in the mobile devices space, pure performance may not be enough.