SO finally, AMD has revealed their next lineup of CPUs, and AMD fans must be overjoyed at the moment (Probably). I myself joined the stream a bit late due to technical problems but I do have a chunk to report.
So the next set of CPUs from AMD’s side has been named Ryzen which has been taken from the Zen architecture name probably. The technical specifications are as follows:
- 8 Cores, 16 Threads@ 2.4 GHz
- L2+L3 20 MB Cache
- AM4 Platform
Other technologies that AMD is including in Ryzen are Smart Prefetch and Neural Net Prediction, both of which as described by Ms. Lisa ‘predict what you are going to do’. I found this functionality very similar to Superfetch, just the execution is different, Windows is a software, Processor is the hardware. Here is what I found about Superfetch:
SuperFetch’s goal is to make applications launch faster. SuperFetch does this by pre-loading your most often used applications in your main memory, based on not only usage patterns, but also on when you use them. For instance, if you have the same routine every morning (Chrome – Mail – Miranda – blu), SuperFetch will pre-load these into memory in the morning. If your evening routine is different (for instance, it includes Word, Excel, and Super Awesome Garden Designer), SuperFetch will adapt, and load those in memory instead during the evening.
To what extent Smart Prefetch and Neural Net Prediction will work is not certain, but according to Ms. Lisa, it will increase the efficiency of a processor to about 1/4 the total processing power.
Other technologies include Pure Power and Precision Boost which increase the control and manage the amount of overclocking automatically depending on what kind of process you are using. Also another interesting fact about Rysen is that it will detect the type of cooling- Air, Passive or Liquid and overclock accordingly keeping temps and clock speeds in check. I personally think this is just another way to say that it will have temperature thresholds according to what frequency the processor will overclock to. All these technologies come together under the name SenseMI and personally I am on mixed opinions on this term, AMD really weird naming decisions and this is one of them.
The rest of the event were demos which I will discuss in brief below. (Only the vital parts)
The first demo was a struggle for power between the i7-6900K and the new Ryzen CPU in which two applications were used for benchmarks- Blender Render, where both the processors performed almost the same. The second test was Transcoding videos and here Rysen finished the benchmark in 54 seconds compared to i7-6900K’s 59 seconds. Also keep in mind that the TDP (Which is not an accurate scale for determining power inpu) of the Rysen chip is 95W whereas Intel’s chip is rated at 140W, so that’s there.
To be fair, Intel’s CPUs are an year old already and it should not come as a surprise if AMD surpasses them. I would also liked it if they had provided other benchmarks like Cine Test Bench etc.
Apart from that there were some demos of Battlefield 1 for which they used a Nvidia GTX Titan, a VR simulation where you had to assemble a PC and some DOTA 2 with PPD.
Also I noticed some inconsistencies with the Livestreams:
1. The Battlefield 1 seemed to have considerable micro-stuttering (This might be a YouTube thing)
2. DOTA 2 was not able to run at a smooth frame rate while streaming on an i7-6700K which according to some users is false.
The last part of the show consisted of the AMD Ryden CPU system running the latest Battlefront DLC on 4K 60+ fps. The demo was not that great if I am being honest, but the atmosphere created for it almost got me to think at one point that they are revealing the RX 490. But anyways, running at 4K 60+ fps is a feat in it’s own right.
This is all I have to report as of now, we will be covering more AMD news, so stay tuned if you are interested in Vega and Ryzen. Also let us know what you think in the comments below.