AMD Confident Zen Will Deliver on Performance

AMD took a blow this past week after another major departure. While some have taken Jim Keller’s departure to be negative news, we aren’t so sure. Internally though, AMD still seems to be in high spirits and hopes are high for Zen.

Speaking for the Zen design team, engineer Suzanne Plummer is optimistic:

“It is the first time in a very long time that we engineers have been given the total freedom to build a processor from scratch and do the best we can do,” Plummer said. “It is a multi-year project with a really large team. It’s like a marathon effort with some sprints in the middle. The team is working very hard, but they can see the finish line. I guarantee that it will deliver a huge improvement in performance and (low) power consumption over the previous generation.”

Set on a 14nm FinFET process, Zen is expected to boost IPC by 40% over current Excavator designs. While that probably won’t be enough to catch up to Intel’s Skylake, it should place Zen withing striking distance of Ivy Bridge or Haswell. This would be good enough performance to claw back sales provided pricing is competitive. Zen is set to launch in Q4 2016.

Thank you myStatesman for providing us with this information