From PC World: AMD on Thursday finally unveiled its new Zen microarchitecture, with a pair of CPUs that could put the company back into the fight with Intel’s best.
AMD said its Summit Ridge CPU, aimed at high-performance desktops, will pack 8 cores and feature simultaneous multi-threading technology to give it 16 threads of processing power. A second chip for servers, code-named Naples, will feature an astounding 32 cores with SMT, giving it 64 threads per CPU. SMT is similar to Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology, which splits a single core into two virtual cores for more performance.
To prove that Zen has the right stuff, AMD officials on Wednesday night demonstrated before a crowd of reporters and analysts that an 8-core Zen could run just as fast as Intel’s newest 8-core consumer Core i7 chip.
Up to now, some had speculated that Zen would fall short. Recently-leaked benchmarks seemed to indicate it was no better than Intel’s Haswell microarchitecture released more than two years ago. If other tests back up AMD’s demonstration, however, it appears to run neck-and-neck with the newly released Broadwell-E. If AMD can live up to its promise, it's great news for the company as well as for consumers.
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