New era of processors from AMD: Review of the presentation of the processor Ryzen (Zen). Smart processor?

December 13, 2016 (December 14, 2016 MSK) a very, very expected event took place - a presentation to the whole world of a new generation of processors from AMD. Those processors that will make excellent competition to Intel.

What could be expected and what we saw in the end? Something pleased, but something not very.

As usual at such events, AMD initially decided to recall its past successes. Do not forget about consoles, which are built on AMD and AMD's great love for the gaming community.

Zen - the code name of the project, on which work was begun 4 years ago. According to the statements (CEO AMD) Lisa Su, this is a new architecture from scratch. And there were highlighted 2 main goals that AMD engineers set for themselves:
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1. Increase the IPC (the number of instructions to be executed per clock) by 40%, keeping within the previous framework of energy consumption in comparison with the Excavator architecture.
   
   
2. Build a smart system. Iron endowed with the necessary features that allow you to accumulate knowledge and learns to work better and better.

Why Zen ? Zen is a balance. The optimal balance between power, consumption and capabilities. Lisa Su believes that the power of Zen will open up new horizons for computing systems. And the pioneer in these endeavors will be a new processor family Ryzen . The executive director of AMD does not hide his ambitions and predicts a new architecture of universal success. It is important to note that Jim Keller (Jim Keller), followed by the successful Athlon XP and Athlon64, was developing the new architecture.



Zen includes not only desktop processors. But it was with AMD desktop processors that they wanted to show Zen to the world.

A total of 4 processor versions are expected in the first quarter of 2017:



What can offer us a new generation. New era, how not to be ashamed of AMD.



(in this frame, behind the back of Liza, the observant viewer may notice a little "bong")

The first birdie will be the processor of the top segment, codenamed SR7 (Summit Ridge):

• 8 cores
• 16 threads
• Base frequency 3.4GHz
• 4MB L2 + 16Mb L3 Cache
• Power consumption up to 95 W
• New Socket AM4

The planned 40% increase in IPC was achieved and even beaten, although it is not known how much.

Looks not bad and that's not all. AMD engineers worked painstakingly on a new technology called the AMD SenseMI . The technology at this stage includes 5 features:

• Neural net Prediction
• Smart prefetch
• Pure power
• Precision boost
• Extended frequensy range

All these features realize the "smart" capabilities of the processor. Hundreds of different sensors transmit their signals to the neural network, the neural network remembers and learns to control the processor at its discretion. Thus, in typical tasks, the processor will be able to increase the frequencies before there is a real need for it. Move the required data from the shared cache to the second level cache before it may be necessary. Reduce power consumption when there is a need, and in cases of extreme importance and possibility, to overclock the processor automatically to frequencies exceeding the turbo. How high such automatic overclocking will be possible depends on the power and cooling system. The director of AMD has not applied a joke about enthusiasts with cooling with liquid nitrogen.

I would like to know much more about the work of AMD SenseMI technology. But after that all attention was paid to tests.

Compare the rendering speed in a blender.



Result at the same level.

Video encoding speed.



A small lead over the processor from AMD.

Then AMD boasted a good responsiveness of the system when working in zbrush with high-poly models ...

Work with models of several million polygons was demonstrated. And it really looks cheerful.



(~ 7 million polygons)



(~ 32 million polygons)



There were a lot of statements about 4K gaming and the readiness of the new platform for these innovations. Comparison "by eye" performance Ryzen and i7 6900K in games and streaming is not accompanied by any technical data on CPU utilization, the number of frames per second, and so on. All this looks very doubtful, but AMD will have to be left up to the first live tests in the hands of enthusiasts.



Stands with the same amount of RAM and NVIDIA Titan X (Pascal) video cards. Here AMD offered us to evaluate the difference of 4K gameplay in Battlefield 1. And this is also on the broadcast in 1080p / 30FPS. And indeed this whole test is useless, since 60 frames per second can be prepared by weaker, "popular" processors on the market.



Demonstration of processor use in the so-called mixed reality (mixed reality). The processor is involved in preparing the 3D scene for virtual reality glasses + a separate viewport for displaying the player in this 3D scene. The topic is still quite young, but already used by enthusiasts on the current hardware available on the market right now.



Comparative test of 3 processors (i7 6700K, i7 6900K, AMD SR7) during which we saw that the new processor copes with the game (Dota 2) and the encoding of the video stream for streaming in 1080p on TWICH. But, strangely, the i7 6700K turned out to be incompetent in this matter, even when overclocked to 4.5 GHz. Streaming came out completely "unmutable". I tried to dispel this myth on my i5 6500.


In general, the entire presentation was accompanied by a scant volume of technical data and is more like a kind of teaser, generating even more questions in the head.

"One more thing ..."

Lastly, the CEO AMD has prepared a demonstration of the capabilities of the new processor + new graphics system, code-named Vega. It was demonstrated 4K gameplay, but again not tweaked by spices from the technical data of the system itself and how it copes with the load.



Prices for new logic were not announced. The only voiced price is USD 2070. So much is the game system shown at the end of the presentation. But what is the equipment for the money - is not known.

The presentation itself looked quite perky, but there remains some unpleasant aftertaste from the understatement and lack of technical details.

The price of the demonstrated processor can only be guessed. For various leaks, it converges on an approximate level of USD 500-600. But considering AMD’s pricing strategy in the video card market, we should not expect AMD to dump the processor market. Still, the SR7 was compared with the i7 6900K, the price of which (USD 1,100) was 2 times higher than the expected price of the SR7. And according to tests, their performance is at about the same level.

But the price will definitely be less than analogs from Intel. And the fact of entering the market a worthy competitor for Intel leaves good hopes for a slight shake-up of the market, and a change in prices in the direction of reducing them.

It remains to wait for new project details, and enthusiasts start to save money to purchase new hardware. Simple consumers are more likely not to stand in line for the purchase of a new system on AMD, since the power of such a processor will be redundant for typical tasks. And "popular" Ryzen processors will appear in the spring and the majority of users expect them.