
AMD’s Zen Summit Ridge 8-core CPUs on Par with Intel I7 5960X Extreme - willvarfar
http://techfrag.com/2016/05/24/amd-zen-summit-ridge-twice-fast-fx-8350-par-intel-i7-5960x-extreme/
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taspeotis

        Intel® Core™ i7-5960X Processor Extreme Edition 
        (20M Cache, up to 3.50 GHz)
        
        Launch Date     Q3'14
    

[http://ark.intel.com/products/82930/Intel-
Core-i7-5960X-Proc...](http://ark.intel.com/products/82930/Intel-
Core-i7-5960X-Processor-Extreme-Edition-20M-Cache-up-to-3_50-GHz)

~~~
Rumudiez
Appreciate the context for that comparison, but imagine that CPU for probably
50% or less the cost and with a DDR4 controller. Sounds like a valuable
product to me.

Maybe somebody could give us an estimated performance per dollar based on this
some previous AMD CPU releases..

~~~
Sanddancer
The 5960x already is DDR4. Also, Intel's supposed to be releasing the
Broadwell-E 6950X in a few weeks, which will have 10 cores. That being said,
the 6950X is also supposed to be $1500. The real fun will be the bang/buck
comparison against the 6900K, which is going to have 8 cores and be $1000.
Regarding bang/buck, it's hard to say, but I'd probably say that AMD places
their part at the $800 price point, which would definitely give it a decent
bang/buck.

Another wrench in comparing things is that AMD's promising some interesting
peripheral support, like 64 lanes of pcie, usb 3.1 and direct nvme support,
which will further complicate direct comparisons until release date. Intel's
hanging on with the x99 chipset, which is stuck with usb 2.0 and pcie 2 for
the support lanes.

Fall will be interesting, to say the least.

~~~
sundvor
On an overclocked 2600k now, with the ageing Sandy Bridge, I'm in the market
for a >4 core CPU myself.

It's a shame the AMD is nearly half a year away, I need the invoice dated June
30 at the latest for tax purposes. So if the AUD isn't too horrible I'll
probably just get a 6850k, water-cooled and overclocked, with the Samsung 950
M2 drive and 32gb DDR4 ram with room for 64. For my work in Visual
Studio/NCrunch/Resharper this will be a killer combo, especially for the I/O
offered by 4 PCIE lanes to the SSD.

Can't wait to see Intel get some competition again though.

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nisa
This is article is pure speculation. The linked source[1] does not make such a
statement.

Basically they put a graph on the right side without labels. This could be
everything. E.g. inverse TDP

1: [http://www.3dcenter.org/news/amd-verspricht-fuer-bristol-
rid...](http://www.3dcenter.org/news/amd-verspricht-fuer-bristol-ridge-
einen-15igen-cpu-performancegewinn) (german)

~~~
walrus01
"According to AMD"... yeah. Right. Just like the last generation.

I'll believe it when I see the benchmarks run by anandtech, arstechnica and
hardocp.

It doesn't have to be as fast as the top end core i7, if they can make
something faster that sells for the price of a mid range core i5.

~~~
tracker1
For me, power usage and heat are pretty big factors... Not having the A/C
running as much in Phoenix summers, let alone the power usage itself is pretty
significant... couldn't believe the difference in moving from FX-8xxx series
in my desktop, home server and htpc to newer intel chips made on my electric
bill.

------
smegel
Breaking news: AMD makes sensational claims about future, unreleased products.

~~~
rubbingalcohol
Before you get downvoted it's worth highlighting that AMD's pre-release hype
and cherry-picked "leaks" are notorious for being over optimistic, to put it
generously. In any case I'm glad to see they're still trying to compete in the
desktop space.

~~~
curt15
It seems like just yesterday when AMD was claiming in pre-release statements a
50 percent performance advantage over Intel's Core 2 offerings.
[http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1165926](http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1165926)

~~~
daveguy
Was that when they followed through and kicked butt at the top end? It has
been quite a while. Or was that when marketing started writing checks their
engineers couldn't cash? (Which has been a theme throughout the bulldozer
line)

~~~
phkahler
I always thought the problem with bulldozer was that marketing considered a
module to be 2 cores, while someone in engineering meant for a module to
compete with a single Intel core. If you go by the later definition, Bulldozer
kicked Intels ass in multithreaded performance and can still compete. It makes
sense because they touted a different variant of hyperthreading they claimed
was better. The problem of course is that makes for a huge expensive core and
only half as many per chip for marketing purposes. It also had shit for single
thread performance either way. But I've always felt this difference of
interpretation for the architecture was a big part of the failure.

~~~
wmf
Even if you compare a 4-module Bulldozer/Piledriver against a 4-core Intel
Sandy/Ivy Bridge, AMD's die size and power consumption were much higher to
deliver similar or worse performance.

~~~
mjevans
They were also stuck at /least/ a process node back due to earlier anti-
competitive practices that Intel didn't get sufficiently penalized for. (Those
practices literally forced AMD out of the same /business/ as Intel; which is
what cemented the situation they've ended up in.) A fair settlement would have
broken up Intel in to isolated fabrication and pattern-design businesses.

------
largote
Hopefully this is true. We need to have competition in the high-end of the CPU
market again.

~~~
tracker1
I'd settle for a competitive upper-mid range with similar power envelope. That
said, I haven't felt "pain" using a computer since I switched to SSDs a number
of years ago, last non-ssd was a Core 2 Duo E6600. Followed by i7-860[1], then
an AMD FX-8350 and now an i7-4790K I've been very happy with.

Thinking of going to dual UHD (4K) displays from my dual 1080p next year,
which will mean a video card update... May try to hold out on a CPU/system
upgrade for a 5 year cycle this time though... I've tended to go with an
upper-mid-range system every 2-3 years.

[1] [http://frugalcoder.us/post/2010/03/07/new-
computer-2010.aspx](http://frugalcoder.us/post/2010/03/07/new-
computer-2010.aspx)

~~~
Infinitesimus
> Thinking of going to dual UHD (4K) displays from my dual 1080p next year,
> which will mean a video card update...

Do you do any gaming? If so you'll definitely need to pony up for a high-end
card at 4k.

I'm in the 1440p (x2) camp for now (got QNIX monitors off ebay for ~<300 a
pop) and will hold out until 4k displays reach that price. Though I'd trade 4k
for 1440p @ 120Hz.

Gonna hold out on GPU upgrades until the next generation of cards (after
Polaris) comes out and drives prices down some more

~~~
tracker1
Not much, though Overwatch looks interesting... I don't game much at all.
Mostly software development, and casual browsing, I just want the extra space.

------
revanx_
The real question : Is Zen going to pack with AMD Platform Security Processor
(PSP)?

[https://libreboot.org/faq/#amdpsp](https://libreboot.org/faq/#amdpsp)

~~~
Qantourisc
I would prefer to have it as an OPTION, and being able to disable or enable
this (without any back doors.) Of course you can never be sure.

------
suprjami
The comparisons in this article seem rather hand-wavy.

"This thing is X% faster than this thing which was Y% slower than this other
thing so they're about even."

Even if these comparisons are true, AMD equaling Intel 2 years after release
is nowhere near the competition we need in the CPU market.

~~~
dman
On the other hand Intel hasnt done anything groundbreaking in the last two
years either.

~~~
BuckRogers
Not groundbreaking but they do make steady, consistent progress. Which is more
than you can credit their competitor for.

~~~
bubuga
> Not groundbreaking but they do make steady, consistent progress.

Not where it matters, which is the price/performance ratio.

It doesn't matter if Intel is able to put in the market their Formula 1 chips
at a Formula 1 price, when most of the world deals with a Honda Civic budget.

When we factor in the fact that the Formula 1 chip isn't even the bottleneck
in the system in most cases, the comparison only gets worse.

~~~
BuckRogers
That's not true but if it were: why isn't AMD's marketshare so great? Good
products win, AMD proved that with the Athlon. They don't have good products
today.

------
vivekchandsrc
Any competition to push Intel to roll out cheaper and better chips are
welcome. :-)

~~~
cm3
Which is also why, once available, many people have to buy AMD chips in order
to keep Intel in check and everybody's chances of getting ripped off lower.
I'll buy AMD because they don't cut out features like ECC. Just recently Intel
introduced a non-feature to disallow Xeon chips on most motherboards, while
previously you could get a cheap Xeon to surpass the consumer CPU. Market
segmentation is what Intel is very good at.

------
amluto
I sincerely hope that AMD doesn't have microarchitectural goofs that slow
everything down like the cache coloring thing last time.

They would do well to revisit some old design errors, too. Grep a recent Linux
kernel for "SYSRET_SS_ATTRS" for a silly one that adds quite a few cycles to
many context switches for no particularly good reason.

------
Qantourisc
I don't see an actual benchmark, so it could be theoretical, practical, or
only in multi-threaded situation. Hopefully soon we will see some actual
product tests.

