AMD shows of first bench of new 8 core ZEN CPU - on par with Intels 8 core Broadwell-E in Blender

Skamander

Both CPUs have 8 cores, can run 16 threads, and are running at 3 GHZ to make it comparable. This looks really promising for workstations. Especially if AMD can not only compete in multithreaded workloads, but also in single threaded workloads and if they can compete in the power efficiency department.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr-5NM6cO8g
http://techreport.com/review/30540/amd-gives-us-our-first-real-moment-of-zen

EDIT - fixed threadtitel from Browadell to Broadwell. :ugly:

skyline5gtr

We shall see when real benchmarks come out, I don't trust the manufacturers test BUT at the same time its about god damn time. Intel & Nvidia have done next to nothing past few years until AMD starting to lit a fire again

leilei

There's been two contradictory benchmark reports already.  Let the CPU fandom wars begin again

PolyHertz

Bring on the price competition. CPUs with good per-thread performance and more then 6 cores are way too expensive atm.

Zack Maxwell

skyline5gtr said:

We shall see when real benchmarks come out, I don't trust the manufacturers test BUT at the same time its about god damn time. Intel & Nvidia have done next to nothing past few years until AMD starting to lit a fire again

How's that? Nvidia and Intel have both released hardware so powerful and efficient that the upcoming generation of laptops will outperform current high-end desktops (GTX 980 gen), without costing you your soul or immolating itself under load.

JedTheKrampus

Between having a laptop and being able to bake good, clean, high-resolution lightmaps in less than a second for a big-ish level on a machine that costs less than $2000, I'd choose the fast lightmaps all the way.

Shrike

If thats true then that would be amazing. Intel needs to make some real advancements, the last 5 years have been absolutely sluggish.

Edit: Wait a minute, AMD said identical clock speeds, so they underclocked the Broadwell (6900k I assume) from 3.7 to 3 Gz ? That would be totally silly. Is that boost clock or default clock ? 6900 has 3.2gz default. That sounds kinda fishy

almighty_gir

Grimwolf said:

skyline5gtr said:

We shall see when real benchmarks come out, I don't trust the manufacturers test BUT at the same time its about god damn time. Intel & Nvidia have done next to nothing past few years until AMD starting to lit a fire again

How's that? Nvidia and Intel have both released hardware so powerful and efficient that the upcoming generation of laptops will outperform current high-end desktops (GTX 980 gen), without costing you your soul or immolating itself under load.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAA

wut? no.

repete

Did everyone forget this? https://www.engadget.com/2016/04/20/intel-s-move-away-from-pcs-is-difficult-but-necessary/

This opens new ground for AMD imo because PC's are not going away anytime soon. Been using the Phenom II X6 (4ghz oc) from 2011 and it's served me well to date.

I hope this is not more AMD hype because they have produced their fair share of shite after the Phenom range. This announcement has my attention as I have been looking into upgrading my cpu next year.    

PolyHertz

Grimwolf said:

Nvidia and Intel have both released hardware so powerful and efficient that the upcoming generation of laptops will outperform current high-end desktops (GTX 980 gen), without costing you your soul or immolating itself under load.

The new laptop GPUs are indeed better then the previous generation desktop ones, but for CPUs it's a completely different story. Even the highest end laptop CPUs are vastly inferior to standard desktop CPUs, and this is not going to change anytime soon.

Skamander

skyline5gtr said:

We shall see when real benchmarks come out, I don't trust the manufacturers test BUT at the same time its about god damn time. Intel & Nvidia have done next to nothing past few years until AMD starting to lit a fire again

Yeah, manufacturers pick the benchmarks in which they look good. But Blender should be a decent pick for a multithreaded performance comparison to their 8 module FX line (e.g. FX 8350 etc.), which as far as I remember was much slower than Intels 4 core CPUs in Blender (a i7 4770 was 50% faster in the BMW bench if I remember correctly).

Nevertheless, I would even go so far and say one should wait 1 or 2 months to evaluate the benchmarks after release of ZEN. I don't know if it is a thing with CPU's, but in the GPU space manufacturers (Asus and MSI come to mind) sometimes ship selected test models to reviewers, which have more overclocking headroom etc. and make the cards look better.

Shrike said:

If thats true then that would be amazing. Intel needs to make some real advancements, the last 5 years have been absolutely sluggish.

Edit: Wait a minute, AMD said identical clock speeds, so they underclocked the Broadwell (6900k I assume) from 3.7 to 3 Gz ? That would be totally silly. Is that boost clock or default clock ? 6900 has 3.2gz default. That sounds kinda fishy

That's not fishy, they stated that they did this, and it makes sense if you want to compare per mhz performance. From this benchmark we can see that Zen has the same (or even slightly better) per mhz performance than Broadwell-E (at least in this specific benchmark that AMD has choosen, and it would be logical to pick a bench in which they look good).

But of course, if Zen's retail CPU's can't hit 3.2 ghz base clock, and 3.7 ghz boost clock on a single core like Intel, they are slightly slower. But slightly slower would at least be in the same ballpark, unlike now, and AMD says that the 3 ghz base clock from this engineering sample is not the targeted clock speed for the retail CPU's (Bulldozer samples were running at 2,5 ghz and retail at 3.6 base and 4.2 ghz turbo). Let's hope they can reach comparable clock speeds as Intel, but I would take their statement with a grain of salt, since Global Foundries produces the CPU's and I can't remember a time since around 2012 in which Global Foundries had not some kind of problems with their manufacturing process (even though it's licensed from Samsung this time).