At their Austin, Texas “New Horizon” Event, AMD introduced us to live “ZEN” chips working full-tilt, showing us what AMD’s passion and ingenuity managed to achieve. The “New Horizon” event was a celebration to what AMD sees as another one of those special, breakthrough moments for a company: after starting work on “ZEN” 4 years ago in 2012 as a complete new design. The focus: building a great machine, whilst increasing IPC by 40% over their previous architecture, at the same power constraints; and to create a smart machine, which could sense and adapt to environment and applications so it improves over time. The company’s verdicts: “ZEN” met or exceeded their goals, with the desktop PC market being home to the very first “ZEN” product.
AMD has created a processor product and brand in AMD Ryzen™ that expresses the power and efficiency of the all-new high-performance and highly efficient “Zen” x86 core. Multiple architectural advances combined with platform and processing technologies propel users to the next horizon of computing.
AMD Ryzen processors will enable the digital creators, VR pioneers, game world explorers, and tech thrill-seekers. Those determined to imagine, code, and conquer without boundaries in the immersive computing era.
Watch the New Horizon livestream replay now and see compelling AMD Ryzen processor demos.
To prove their words and commitment to Ryzen’s performance, AMD showcased the chip’s prowess in a Blender test, pitting a Ryzen CPU at 3.4 GHz base clock (without Boost), with the consumer market’s only other 8-core, 16-thread CPU in the Intel i7 6900K, at its stock 3.2 GHz base clock, with Boost enabled and no adjustments, “straight out of the box”. The verdict: Ryzen matched the 6900K’s performance. Dr. Lisa Su was quick to point out the 6900K’s pricing at $1100, though she left an intentional silence at the point where she could have made a bombastic pricing announcement for Ryzen – perhaps keeping her cards close to her chest so as to not allow Intel to figure out any pricing changes in their products (if any), should Ryzen prove deserving of such a response. But the bottom line, and the home-run hit by Lisa Su, was the announcement that Ryzen was able to match Intel’s performance with 45 W less TDP – 95 W TDP on Ryzen against the 140 W TDP on Intel’s 6900K. In another test, this time a Handbrake transcoding demo, Ryzen transcoded a video in 54 seconds, against 59 seconds on Intel’s 6900K processor.
AMD is back!
