March 29, 2024

The Next Generation processors from AMD is still undergoing development and it will take some time to reveal in market. A tech report from Sweclockers told us that the processor which reportedly arrives at 2016 will make home to a new family of high-performance chips known as Summit Ridge, AMD’s First Zen Architecture.This new processor will be aimed towards both Desktop and servers, and it will deliver true next generation performance over the four years of journey of Bulldozer Architecture.

This Zen Architecture featured inside with 14nm technology.The report posted by the source is pretty detailed, unveiling information we have never before heard of. For instance, we are well known to FX and Opteron series however AMD has planned a new name for their next generation AMD Zen based family and they will be called Summit Ridge. This Architecture might follow some link up with K12 ARM Core Family which AMD seems to be launching in 2016 that is based on their own custom design i.e 64-bit design (x64 Architecture). Now the source of K12 is followed from , K12 is the name of the second highest peak situated in the Karakoram range so Summit Ridge as a whole may be a reference to peak in performance and efficiency since this is a completely new architecture which sounds very different from other processor architectures. This report is very big strike to many tech enthusiast that AMD is directly moving to 14nm from their 32nm technology. The Summit Ridge series will contain up to 8 [x86] cores based on the AMD Zen architecture and will be manufactured by either Samsung or Global Foundries which seems to be a good output. On the power feeding part, where AMD being always hyped about its ”High Power Consumption or TDP” , AMD currently pushes APUs to 95W TDP and FX Series 8 Core 5GHz CPUs at 125W TDP to Max 220W TDP but this time the Zen based processors will feature a maximum TDP of 95W which is inline with Intel’s 22nm Haswell offerings and the upcoming Intel’s Broadwell-K Series also and there will also be more power efficient variants turning the TDP down to more conservative levels as Zen will be featured across the board and is likely to be as scalable as Broadwell architecture which has seen 4.5W TDP variants in the form of Broadwell-Y.

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On the main architectural side of things, AMD Zen cores will take the best from Bulldozer and Jaguar, delivering a SMT (Simultaneous Multithreaded) design that takes advantage of the various resources in the core and dedicate it to an additional execution thread for added throughout. This things punch up those area efficiency of the core design and reduces the effect of stalls and pipeline back pressure leading to improved resource utilization inside the core which in result gives an outstanding performance.There are also talks regarding the platforms where it’s mentioned that AMD is planning to make a new socket called AMD FM3 Socket. AMD didn’t mentioned the support for the FM3 Socket and many might say that its a successor of FM2+ but it might be AMD planning to unify all of their processors on a same socket since that’s what they are going to do Project’Sjybridge’offering pin-to-pin compatibility for x86 and ARM chips. AMD also adopted a similar design for Carrizo and Carrizo-L which are pin-to-pin compatible. This socket unification project may extend to Zen,offering compatibility of high-performance consumer processors and server chips on the same socket.
The Zen chips will include North-Bridge on the same silicon as CPU and the new South-Bridge for motherboards that will be known as ”Promontory” which is also a name of landmass like the K12 peak.

AMD also revealed their Soldered Down Memory Layout for AMD based embedded systems for the ZEN Architecture and its rumored to be compatible with DDR4 Memory,but we will cover it in another part.

Source : WCCF Tech