AMD is holding a live-stream "New Horizon" event on December 13 at 3pm CST to showcase the performance of its Zen CPU. AMD's Zen is perhaps one of the most exciting processor releases in recent history, largely due to the redesigned microarchitecture, which promises a 40% IPC boost compared to the previous-generation AMD products.
You can register for the live-streamed event here, but there are very few details available. We do know that eSports and Evil Geniuses "legend" PPD will (apparently) do some live gaming on a Zen system, and the company also notes that there will be appearances from other special guests and prize giveaways. Geoff Keighley will MC the event.
We already had some hands-on time with functional Zen Summit Ridge desktop systems at an offsite location during Intel's IDF event earlier this year, but we weren't allowed to benchmark the systems, so the demo machines provided little more than confirmation that the systems were running well. The event also featured a demonstration of Zen beating a Broadwell-E Core i7-6900K (albeit, an underclocked one) in a multi-threaded Blender workload. AMD conducted the Blender test with both processors clocked at 3.0GHz to highlight performance on a level playing field, but we expect Zen to debut with higher clocks when it comes to the retail market.
Our tests results from a leaked Intel i7-7700K Kaby Lake CPU indicate that (as expected) there isn't a quantum leap forward as we move from Intel's Skylake to Kaby Lake, which makes the pending Zen launch all the more interesting.
Hopefully, the live-streamed event will give us further insight into gaming performance, and perhaps a bit more technical detail as well. AMD is shipping the AM4 platform, which supports Zen, with its 7th-gen Bristol Ridge APUs, but one might expect the demonstration to occur on the as-of-yet unannounced AM4 enthusiast chipset.
AMD plans to begin shipping retail Zen SKUs in Q1 2017, so the trickle of information will soon turn into a flood. We do know that the company is on track with its schedule, so we expect to hear much more during CES in early January 2017.
The AMD registration website popped up without a formal press release or announcement from AMD, but we have reached out for further details.
