FEATURED AMD ZEN Discussion (Previous Rumor Thread)

Silver_Pharaoh said:

Who cares! It beats FX chips and thats all that matters to me. TBH i think everyone is comparing ZEN to Intel too much.

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Kind of hard not to, when their only true desktop-level competition is Intel who has had the performance crown for almost a decade. If AMD wants Zen to be successful they will at least have to attempt to be competitive with Intel's offerings or offer such a significant price discount that it makes it an obvious choice. AMD's earning reports came out and they lost a ton of money yet again.

Mr.Scott said:

Skylake isn't much better than Haswell. I'd say it's a pretty good boost for AMD. If the price point is right, it puts them back in the game.

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For the higher clocked ones that will rival Haswell, I'm betting that the price point will be wrong. Fury came out priced too high (I bought one cheap on eBay to play with anyway) and I can't see Zen coming out at a low price. Plus it will be competing against Kaby Lake, the 14nm successor to Skylake, and Broadwell-E the follow-up to Haswell-E. And even though it may be a big boost compared to AMD's current offerings, I doubt it can make me move from my X99 Haswell-E platform.

I hope I'm wrong, because I'm chomping at the bit to build an AMD setup again.

I'm going to guess that it will be right around, if not a bit less than, Skylake CPUs...

As long as we're speculating, I'm guessing it'll be roughly 35% cheaper than Skylake.

I guess that if it's enthusiast series then price difference won't be so important as general performance. If AMD won't hurry then will be the same as with every other cpu and gpu series in last ~8 years.

Janus67 said:

Kind of hard not to, when their only true desktop-level competition is Intel who has had the performance crown for almost a decade. If AMD wants Zen to be successful they will at least have to attempt to be competitive with Intel's offerings or offer such a significant price discount that it makes it an obvious choice. AMD's earning reports came out and they lost a ton of money yet again.

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True, but for me I'm finished with Intel.
The last Intel chip I had left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Plus I hate paying premiums. Intel is way overpriced IMO. I compare them to Apple, which I hate.

So that's probably why I'm biased a bit.

Silver_Pharaoh said:

The last Intel chip I had left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

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What happened?

Silver_Pharaoh said:

True, but for me I'm finished with Intel.
The last Intel chip I had left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Plus I hate paying premiums. Intel is way overpriced IMO. I compare them to Apple, which I hate.

So that's probably why I'm biased a bit.

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Apple is like 95% marketing. It's hard to compare Intel to them ... not yet. If you compare Intel to AMD then you get higher performance at higher price but also lower power usage etc. so I also can't see where Intel is so much overpriced. We were comparing prices of similar performance couple of times on the forums. You get Intel which in most cases keeps its quality and AMD where you have to pay premium to get that expected quality. At the end you won't pay much more for Intel while is much easier to keep it cool and quiet. You also don't have to buy any special cooling or add fans next to vrm to overclock it.

I just see no other option than Intel right now. AMD is like couple of years behind and if they won't release anything soon then will lose again.
The only group of users which cares about AMD are enthusiasts but they have like 5% market. Manufacturers don't focus on AMD products. It's just not worth it. Business users forgot about AMD long time ago. At work I don't even remember when I offered any desktop or laptop based on AMD ... 7 years ago maybe.

I wish to see something good from AMD what would refresh the market but I simply don't really believe it will happen anytime soon.

RJARRRPCGP said:

What happened?

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I'm curious to hear about this... not sure a cpu can leave a bad taste in my mouth. Consider the differences between a couple generations is significant (think Penryn to Nehalem to SB to Haswell to skylake). They really so different to me, I couldn't hold a grudge.

Mr.Scott said:

As long as we're speculating, I'm guessing it'll be roughly 35% cheaper than Skylake.

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Why speculating ? we're basing this on "facts" presented to us by the nice AMD CEO

Woomack said:

I wish to see something good from AMD what would refresh the market but I simply don't really believe it will happen anytime soon.

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Unless ZEN is a stepping stone to something a lot better, AMD sadly so far is only playing catch-up (and fairly badly, Devil's Canyon/Haswell is how old ?), this was said many times. Even if they make it as cheap as the FX it will still lose out comparatively and get bad rep because of it. I always liked AMD and i have a tendency to root for the "little guy" so to speak, but in this case i really don't know

RJARRRPCGP said:

What happened?

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Terrible overclocking experience on my 3570K. Couldn't get the piece of crap stable over 4.4Ghz. Constant WHEA errors even though it was Prime95 stable and eventually, silent corruption.
I upgraded to the 3570K from my i5 2300 which overclocked like a champ, and even at 4.4Ghz, the preformace gains from the 3570K were not great.
Switched to the FX 6300, and had a great time tinkering with it. Everything just works. And vs the i5 2300, the FX is the winner. (Vs the 3570K, it was a side-grade)

You are correct to say I paid quite a premium to get the FX watercooled AND getting a new mobo for it, but It's worth it in my books.
Intel is simple to overclock, just a few knobs. AMD not so much, which is also why I love it. I don't need all that preformace an Intel can get me. The upfront costs for the CPU and mobo are too great for me. $370 for a 6600K + $270 for a good mobo, ASRock Extreme 6 = $640? That's nuts in my books. Grab a Saberkitty ($260) and a 8320E ($210) and it's only $470. Leaving plenty of cash for an OS, RAM, SSD and aftermarket cooling.
$94 for the cheapest set of DDR4 (4x4Gb), grab an SSD and a case and you are nearing $1K.

Bottom line, I would rather pay a bit extra over the course of a few years for a rig that I can fun with vs paying a fair bit more upfront for a Intel rig I set it and forget it. (Overclocking) Plus AMD's price tag over time is easier to swallow.

Am I being unfair about that ONE bad Intel chip? Probably yeah, but I just didn't feel like coughing up another $270 for a 3570K for potentially another crappy (4.5Ghz) chip. At the time the 3570K was only just 1 gen old. The 4xxx chips were just rolling out. I had Mandrake here buy me the 3570K from Microcenter since it was $320+ for one up here. I got hit with taxes at the border AND the CPU ended up in Newfoundland due to a postal error. In the end, that 3570K was only $20 cheaper vs buying it myself. I was expecting quite a boost in preformance vs the i5 2300 @ 3.4 Ghz. I was thoroughly upset after the whole experience. Wasted $300....

Woomack said:

Apple is like 95% marketing. It's hard to compare Intel to them ... not yet. If you compare Intel to AMD then you get higher performance at higher price but also lower power usage etc. so I also can't see where Intel is so much overpriced. We were comparing prices of similar performance couple of times on the forums. You get Intel which in most cases keeps its quality and AMD where you have to pay premium to get that expected quality. At the end you won't pay much more for Intel while is much easier to keep it cool and quiet. You also don't have to buy any special cooling or add fans next to vrm to overclock it.

I just see no other option than Intel right now. AMD is like couple of years behind and if they won't release anything soon then will lose again.
The only group of users which cares about AMD are enthusiasts but they have like 5% market. Manufacturers don't focus on AMD products. It's just not worth it. Business users forgot about AMD long time ago. At work I don't even remember when I offered any desktop or laptop based on AMD ... 7 years ago maybe.

I wish to see something good from AMD what would refresh the market but I simply don't really believe it will happen anytime soon.

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Correct, for most Intel is easier to manage, but that's just not me.
Like I said, I don't need the better preformance that Intel provides so I'd rather spend my money on a rig I can play with.

Therefore I am, an AMD enthusiast.

Kenrou said:

Why speculating ? we're basing this on "facts" presented to us by the nice AMD CEO

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Speculating on pricing. NOBODY has released anything on that at all.

Probably won't until a couple months before release

Look at the gains that AMD engineers were able to make with the sorta-horrible BD architecture. In the same time that intel refined the SB architecture to the devils canyon level AMD made equivalent steps on the BD architecture. Yes it did leave them behind the game, and wanting. The gains in the APU arena also made waves for the company. Now I am not gonna pull out my soap box and tout that AMD will take the performance crown because unless a miracle happens again its simply not in the cards. However, if they are able to come back into shooting distance of Intels latest generation, and get their TDP under control with a fresh design that they can continue to optimize I think we have a win.

Overall although the products have been lack luster(on the CPU side) over the last few generations the progress has been there. The company has shown that they are back on a consistently innovative track with regular product releases and good customer support. I am not delusional enough to believe that a single product release is enough to fix their reputation, but what I see is a company that is continuing to get back on track and consistently innovating. A few more years of that and we will have a legitimate competitor in both the CPU and GPU arenas.

I never thought AMD to be so far behind Intel. In fact they have decent stuff.

Problem is people like big numbers. So we gonna pay a lot more to gain a frame rate while gaming, talk smack about AMD CPU but yet buy into AMD gpu.

However I don't like AMD gpu. I like NVidia. But no reason to knock down AMD either. I buy the AMD CPU product for the price point. 8 threads under 200, games fine just like their gpus do and couldn't be happier with tweaking.

Hopefully they don't lock the reference clock on ZEN. That will be a dissapointment. Oh and bring back core unlocking. That made hw tweaking really fun.

Actually AMD gpus is what keeps AMD alive. Only on graphics they have some profits and as you probably know, in general AMD is losing every year ( both money and customers ).
AMD is focusing almost only on graphics and lately also on lower power chips ( even though not many of them were released ). They release many more APUs than CPUs. FX is like "we still have something to say" series but even AMD doesn't believe it's good. They are releasing gaming PCs based on Intel but with their graphics and that says a lot.

I just can't get why AMD is pushing already failed idea of FX. Probably need something till they release anything better and they can't remove whole product line from the market when there are still people who want it ( regardless if it's good or not ).
On the other hand look how motherboard manufacturers are acting. They have to release new motherboards if there are available CPUs and potential customers but most of motherboards have design flaws. At the end if you are an enthusiast/overclocker and want to have good AMD board then you have to pay premium. Many FX 8xxx users were forced to move to the most expensive motherboards to achieve their goals. Even if you are not overclocking much and just want to have cheaper platform then you may have various issues with motherboards designed for AMD. Quick examples, all Gigabyte 970/990FX series with like 5 PCB revisions, lack of BIOS support after ~2 months after motherboard release, overheating vrm, memory support issues, ... list is long.
What I want to say here is that AMD has cheaper CPUs but total platform cost isn't lower than Intel if you also compare performance.

So again, I wish to see something good from AMD. I'm overclocking everything and I'd rather have something to play with than next similar Intel platform but I really had enough of AMD after 4 failed motherboards, 2 dead CPUs and 3 months waiting for RMA replacements. Some know that I was testing Phenoms, FX and APUs for some longer but I've reached the point when I was waiting for RMA more than I was actually playing with the hardware. Other thing is that I can't use AMD for competitive benchmarking. It's like LN2 or waste of time and I have no good access to LN2.

We can only have hope that AMD release ZEN quick and it won't be pure marketing like with everything they released in last years.

I wouldn't mind buying a Zen with Haswell/Broadwell-like performance assuming it is logically priced, even if the chip is 2 years late to the performance party. My main goals for overhauling my rig are getting new tech like SATAIII, DDR4, m.2, PCIE 3.0, USB 3.0, etc. All of these are currently missing on my rig, so when I need to do a large file transfer to a portable drive it takes ages, and my internal storage is pretty slow as well. Overall system speed is sluggish (I can imagine) vs new stuff. Total chip speed is less important as it's not much of a bottle neck these days, and processors are getting faster at a slowing pace.

Of all the discussion in here, Maxvla has spoken the most truth in why you would want to buy Zen.

I'm not going to try and figure out the performance when I have nothing but speculation in my hands. I know no one that has these chips even in early stage ES. What I hope for is the Haswell/Broadwell experiance as well. I Xeon series Has/Broad in my work server/laptop and I really enjoy the performance that they put out. I can see the difference when going home and using my 9590 at stock. What I really need though is the PCIE 3.0, M.2 (since SATA is dead), and maybe DDR4 (Its just faster... Intel Xpoint is what I want ). If I can get that the performance and features of a Xeon class Broadwell at a Desktop AMD price, than I'm down for the transitional upgrade.

CPU Speed will not be increasing at the rate it used, and only newer tricks will be exposed to perform the same task in a couple less clock cycles. What you will be seeing is the CPU growing larger and larger with each generation of smaller FETs. Intel's goal is to include all ICs onto the CPU, so that the system is a giant SOC. They will also be introducing FPGAs to their CPUs which will give them a huge lead front end out of order instruction handling and execution. AMD is kinda all over the place. Best bet is that they continue to grow their CPU and include the GPU more and more, removing most of the single threaded functionality of the CPU, and continuing with multi-threaded performance.

The idea of general purpose CPUs will be shoved to ARM, since they are catching up quicker than AMD and Intel expanding. We are already seeing it in the server market, it won't be too long where ARM is in just about all consumer electronics.

I'm not a big speculator either. I catch hell for that all the time. I'm more of a show me kind of guy. It's still 6mos+ before we see anything concrete from AMD and in my heart I hope they have something that can compete. They don't have to be on top but if they lose their OC headroom like the Godvari then they'll have some problems. Even the enthusiasts won't buy a chip with 20% headroom for OC

Silver_Pharaoh said:

Terrible overclocking experience on my 3570K. Couldn't get the piece of crap stable over 4.4Ghz. Constant WHEA errors even though it was Prime95 stable and eventually, silent corruption.
I upgraded to the 3570K from my i5 2300 which overclocked like a champ, and even at 4.4Ghz, the preformace gains from the 3570K were not great.
Switched to the FX 6300, and had a great time tinkering with it. Everything just works. And vs the i5 2300, the FX is the winner. (Vs the 3570K, it was a side-grade)

You are correct to say I paid quite a premium to get the FX watercooled AND getting a new mobo for it, but It's worth it in my books.
Intel is simple to overclock, just a few knobs. AMD not so much, which is also why I love it. I don't need all that preformace an Intel can get me. The upfront costs for the CPU and mobo are too great for me. $370 for a 6600K + $270 for a good mobo, ASRock Extreme 6 = $640? That's nuts in my books. Grab a Saberkitty ($260) and a 8320E ($210) and it's only $470. Leaving plenty of cash for an OS, RAM, SSD and aftermarket cooling.
$94 for the cheapest set of DDR4 (4x4Gb), grab an SSD and a case and you are nearing $1K.

Bottom line, I would rather pay a bit extra over the course of a few years for a rig that I can fun with vs paying a fair bit more upfront for a Intel rig I set it and forget it. (Overclocking) Plus AMD's price tag over time is easier to swallow.

Am I being unfair about that ONE bad Intel chip? Probably yeah, but I just didn't feel like coughing up another $270 for a 3570K for potentially another crappy (4.5Ghz) chip. At the time the 3570K was only just 1 gen old. The 4xxx chips were just rolling out. I had Mandrake here buy me the 3570K from Microcenter since it was $320+ for one up here. I got hit with taxes at the border AND the CPU ended up in Newfoundland due to a postal error. In the end, that 3570K was only $20 cheaper vs buying it myself. I was expecting quite a boost in preformance vs the i5 2300 @ 3.4 Ghz. I was thoroughly upset after the whole experience. Wasted $300....

Correct, for most Intel is easier to manage, but that's just not me.
Like I said, I don't need the better preformance that Intel provides so I'd rather spend my money on a rig I can play with.

Therefore I am, an AMD enthusiast.

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what was so bad about a 4.5ghz oc ? that was the higher end of avg when they were released . the 6300 was not a side grade from a 4.5ghz Ivy .
But I do mess playing with amds , Thunderbirds , Athlons M (were really really fun) , a64's , x2's had them all till c2ds came out and changed the game.