Will zen save AMD?

AMD has some 650M of debt to pay in 2019, 500M in 2021, 400M in 2022 and 450M in 2024 (this is what i remember). That's a total of 2B of debt by 2024. While the debt is huge, I think AMD is managing itself well these days. They have entered into an agreement with Chinese firm for servers and have already succeeded in their first milestone. It hasn't been said what the milestone is but money is there and that's what AMD needs.

Zen should be better than BD, that's quite easy for AMD as even phenom 2 was better than BD. So the difference between AMD and Intel should decrease, especially in servers and notebook market where high frequency isn't required to be a great product. Intel will have best chips, that's kind of obvious though.

Hopefully people will get an AMD product too and prevent monopoly but I don't expect many to do that. Not many people are far sighted.

If Zen is what AMD has promised us, I really think it will push AMD back up.

But no-one knows yet how it will perform.

We will see...

You know I have not even bothered looking at preliminary results for Zen CPU. I would be nice if those CPUs can perform similarly to Intel's Ivy Bridge / Haswell generation CPUs. AMD does not have to beat Intel (though that would be interesting), they only need to competitive enough with Intel for Zen to be successful enough to recapture lost market share and be able to generate enough revenues to payoff debt and fund more R&D to increase both CPU and GPU market shares.

CPU benchmarks for games have generally shown that 2nd generation Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs are still capable of providing performance that not very far off from Skylake generation CPUs. So even those 2011 CPUs are still relevant today when it comes to playing modern games using modern GPUs.


I am interested in what they bring to the mobile side of the market. I doubt AMD APUs will be relevant in the tablet market, but they need to recapture lost market share in the laptop sector.

I guess much of Amd success right now is due to Sony. With the PS4-S and its successor both capable of full 4k gaming, Zen powered cpus might just put them in the black. Gonna put a whole new spin on console vrs pc at 1080p.

About those laptops, I owned a laptop with an AMD A6-5357M, and it was just horrible. Overpriced as *censored for reasons*, fan screaming at 100% all the time, weird cracking sound from the fan, and it seriously almost burned my fingers.

(Oh boy am I glad that I own a proper PC now )

And yes, they will need to bring something amazing to the mobile market. The AMD A12 sounds good, but I just don't know will it perform as promised. If it is a proper 4 core without CMT (looking at you, AMD A6), they just might be able to catch up. I am very interested to see what they will deliver..

The A12's coming out now are still Bulldozer-derivatives, and not Zen. They're Carizzo-refresh CPUs, representing the 4th generation construction core architecture. Performance per clock is still extremely far below Intel's CPUs, and it's still built on TSMC's old 28nm process, but AMD has largely gotten power consumption under control, making it a half-decent entry-level mobile CPU, usually coming in between a Pentium/Celeron and Skylake i3 both in CPU and graphics performance, though with a bit more power consumption and a bit less battery life. You'll need to wait until sometime mid to late next year before seeing Zen-based APUs.

I don't have a crystal ball, do you?

If it's what they say it is, then most likely yes. If it isn't, hen most likely no.

Jim Keller made intel run for their money in the past, i hope this new tech he developed will do the same.
Haswell to Skylake had a 5% improvement. Intel claims "Kaby into the Lake" will have a 10% increase compared to Skylake.
I might be mistaken, correct me if i am wrong, but the zen rumors while Kaby lake was being researched and developed forced intel to step up their game and actually change their research policy about "tic toc". If amd wasn't coming up with a new processor to get back into the competition Kaby would be another 5% increase compared to skylake with a just couple more instructions added.
Intel has enough money to revolutionize the market, but that money is for the share holders and board of directors, if cant be used for ground breaking research....
Now AMD will probably get close to kaby into the lake or skylake, doesn't matter, what matters is that with a fraction of the R&D funds of intel they managed to creat something ground breaking compared to their old tech. Intel never once achieved a +40% IPC from a previous generation to a new one, NEVER. And dont forget the huge debt amd has, and the fact AMD developed RX 480 for mid range where 80% of GPU consumer is. RX 480 that is showing better performance on DX 12 just because of the fact they have asynchronous compute support through hardware. And still AMD gpu division has fraction of nvidia R&D funds.
Imagine if Nvidia used all its money on actually making ground breaking GPU and not just Refresh Maxwell and call it Pascal.... Nvidia knew DX12 was coming one way or the other, Vulkan api was already being developed before Nvidia decided to refresh Maxwell.
Many games will come with dx 12 this year, and on the very few games that already have DX 12 support like Deus Ex Nvidia gains nothing, its actually gets worst if you move to DX 12. Rx 480 gets close to 1070 when using dx 12 on Deus EX, still away from but closer.
Older AMD cards like 390/Fury or even 290 getting performance gains after all this years, my last GPU a GTX 960 never saw a single performance gain on any driver version.
I am almost sure GTX 980 owners are already in legacy support.

Jim Keller is only one engineer, and he isn't even working for AMD right now. He left sometime early last year to work for Tesla.

Also, I'm pretty sure Prescott -> Conroe was greater than 40%, and Bulldozer superficially resembled Prescott a lot.

It's not about you being pretty sure or not facts are that Jim Keller past cpu was better then Intel similar version.
Btw Jim Keller was lead designer of zen and the team working with him in zen project stayed in amd.
Jim Keller worked for jobs at Apple and developed the 4 and 4s processors and was fired by jobs cause their big eggos kept clashing with each other. And as recent news Jim Keller has been invited by Apple again to create and design some upcoming tech. I suspect it's a cpu for future iPhone.

They're not "Jim Keller's CPUs", Keller was one engineer working on a team of hundreds, if not thousands of engineers who helped to design a series of CPUs. I'm sure he had some decision-making power, but ultimately very little of the design itself was done by him.

I'm am pretty sure... Almost sure. You need to sure don't assume things.
Go look for Jim Keller bio. Says lead designer. The revolution came from is head others helped build it. Just as it was with the iPhone invention from jobs. And as it was with the k7 cpu 1st true 64 bit desktop processor.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)
Here is the link saved you the hard work of googling it.
Best regards.

PS it's Tesla motors not Tesla from Nvidia. So nobody miss understands it.

Just look at this FX 8150 beating or tying some of Intel's best CPU's at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=devZ8jETRJo

We all know how bad the bulldozer CPU was too and AMD made it look great in the benchmarks they showed.

I had an FX 8120 for a while and anytime I wanted to feel better about my purchase I watched that video. Lol. I eventually got an Intel CPU though.

So, as the news tells us: AMD contracted with Global Foundries and they borrowed (they're calling it "Strategic Collaboration") Samsung's 14nm FinFET LPE/LPP process technology to create Zen. Jim Keller made the decision to switch from a Clustered Muli-Threading (CMT) design (see Bulldozer) to a Simultaneous Multi-threading (SMT) design for Zen, which is similar to Hyper-Threading in Intel's design. Completely shifting from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), and changing the way process threads are handled from a hardware perspective will DEFINITELY make a difference. How much of a difference? Speculation only, for now... I’m cautiously optimistic though.

http://www.globalfoundries.com/newsroom/press-releases/2014/04/17/samsung-and-globalfoundries-forge-strategic-collaboration-to-deliver-multi-sourced-offering-of-14nm-finfet-semiconductor-technology

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/234354-a-state-of-zen-amd-unveils-new-architectural-details-on-its-latest-cpu-core

As for Intel, they've never been a product I've found worthwhile. Intel's Pentium 90Mhz. up to the latest Core product is garbage. I would value their company at a fraction of a sliver of an invalidated penny. Why? They don't value customers, they value the customer's money. Ever played a free to play MMO that allows you to pay to win? Ever thought it was a top shelf product? No? Me either...

https://www.engadget.com/2010/09/18/intel-wants-to-charge-50-to-unlock-stuff-your-cpu-can-already-d/

Of course Intel wants your money, that's the direct result of capitalism. AMD is different only in the methods they need to use, as a market underdog.

I think, it'll be either a good 'budget' gaming option with no overclock room (New 'borrowed' tech will be the reason, imo) or it'll fail due to pricing to performance ratio compared to Intel.

If it really is as good as we think it might be it's not going to be very cheap. Sure it might be cheaper than what Intel offers but I still expect it to cost a lot more than people think it will cost. AMD has said already they don't want people to consider their new processors as just 'the budget option'.