Zen-based Opteron will have 32 cores

[BoraMurdar]

Content source

http://www.fudzilla.com/news/processors/39932-amd-s-zen-based-opteron-will-have-32-cores

8 channel DDR-4 support

A computer engineer at CERN has leaked information about AMD’s doings for Operon after Zen becomes its architecture of choice.

Tweaktown said that Liviu Valsan was showing off some slides and it appears that he knows the inside trouser measurement of the Zen-based Opteron.

According to the slide the Zen-based Opteron would be made on the 14nm process which will bring a 40 per cent improvement for Instructions Per Clock compared to current generation AMD processors.

It will also have 32 physical cores and 8-channel DDR4 support which is up from the quad-channel DDR4 from Chipzilla.

If AMD offers Opteron with up to 32 CPU cores, the company can scale down to 8, 16, and 24 cores easily which should mean that on the consumer desktop platform, AMD will have 8-core FX series CPUs. It is also possible that we will see 16-core processors based on Zen, too.

Of course we are talking about Zen and waiting for that is like waiting for Godot. If Valsan and his CERN chums can reverse the polarity on the neutron flow or something and speed up the chip’s arrival there will be many people who will be grateful.

 

[cruelsister]

Sad to say AMD is in a world of hurt recently, and I hope that Zen will be one piece in a rather complex recovery process. The key thing from the graphic that Bora provided is the 40% improvement in Instructions per Cycle, this being the measure of single-threaded performance- something Bulldozer and Excavator sorely lack. As the majority of computer use would be single thread, AMD's deficiency in this area was the main reason why AMD chips sucked when compared to those from Intel.

A further issue for AMD is that they have really cut down on R&D over the past few years. This lack of product investment really shows up in the Graphics market. Both Nvidia and Radeon (AMD) want to move to a 20nm process but can't because the Fabs are full up with orders from Apple and Qualcomm. This being the case they have to make their stuff more efficient on the current 28nm process, and increased efficiency is directly proportional to R&D spending. Nvidia has been able to outspend AMD in such development which has led to Nvidia cards being faster and more power efficient at a lower price point (an example is that the GeForce 970 is faster, cooler, and less noisy then the Radeon 290X while being about 30% less expensive. That's the main reason why Radeon's mareket share has plunged in the past 2 years from 40% of the market to a bit over 18% today.

Finally please note that AMD gets most of its cash from selling semi-custom SoCs for all of the major game consoles. The bad news here that as a rule of thumb their revenue from this will decline 15% annually until new game consoles hit the market- and this is a few years away.

And really finally, AMD has borrowed quite a bit of cash to keep things going resulting in a 40 million USD quarterly interest payment to come up with. So it's no mystery why they have been cutting costs.

I do hope things work out for them, but currently it does not look good.

 

[woodrowbone]

32 cores?
I am still waiting to see Windows utilize more then one core during Windows update for example, svchost to be more exact.
You would expect more speed by now, right?

/W

 

[songoku316]

amd needs to optimize power consumption amd performance if they want to compete really with intel