AMD Ryzen Processor Update: Leaked Slides Reveal Future Of Processor Market

Feb 18, 2017 08:25 AM EST | Andrew Davis

With the release date of the highly anticipated AMD Ryzen processors nearing, some new information that the tech giant largely kept private even from the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) began to surface. Private slides containing a whole range of details on the new processor's design architecture were leaked on a Japanese website.

According to the leaked details on PC Watch, in this architecture, the processor uses two integer engines and one floating point unit per core. The new architecture, however, will be employing Neural Net Prediction.

This is a technology based on taking an educated guess as to what a specific branch in a program's code will do ahead of time. In doing so, it increases performance by saving on processor time.

If the guess is correct, then the code is executed faster. If the prediction is wrong, however, there is a stall. But AMD's new branch predictor avoids this by being constantly supplied with data.

One thing of note though is that AMD goes out of its way to compare the Zen core with an unnamed but presumably Intel-manufactured chip. It turns out the Zen die comes in at a slightly smaller footprint than the competitor chip which is also 14 nm. But in the process, the AMD Ryzen cores manage to squeeze in an L2 cache much more efficiently.

Also contained in the AMD Ryzen leaked information is apparently the way the Zen chips were designed to handle heat and power. According to the slides, the Zen chips does the job through a combination of more than 1,300 path monitors, 48 power supply monitors, 20 thermal diodes, and 9 droop detectors, reports Digital Trends. With this plethora of monitors and detectors, the chip is constantly gathering massive amounts of data that can be used to identify stronger cores, supplying the perfect power to every part of the chip, and running clock speeds to their absolute maximum.

Other interesting facts hidden away in the slides are the Zen's adopting a simultaneous multithreading process, which is a more traditional multi-tasking process very much alike Intel's own hyper-threading. All Zen chips appear to sport a 3.4 Ghz base clock with some variants noticeably higher.

Taking these leaks into consideration though gives a glimpse into the future of the processor market. Finally, AMD is set once again to take center stage along with Intel.

Intel's monopoly of the market, brought about by a superior processor technology, may finally come to an end once the AMD Ryzen series is officially launched. With the Ryzen, AMD is introducing simultaneous multi-threading instead of clustered multi-threading.

This means that in multi-thread applications, each core will execute two threads simultaneously. This design allows for the single large integer cluster meaning higher single-thread performance. This translates to a 40% increase in speed than the previous generation of chips in terms of instructions per clock executed.

Meanwhile, Forbes reports that we could be seeing the AMD Ryzen chipsets by Feb 28 or by March 2. And these could be priced around $129 for the 4-core to $500 for the 8-core or 16-thread Ryzen 7-1800x.

With mere weeks away from the unveiling of AMD Ryzen chipsets, enthusiasts and fans alike are anxious as to their performance and how they would fare well with Intel's processors. Perhaps, AMD is not back, but could possibly be on top if these leaks were true.

See Now: OnePlus 6: How Different Will It Be From OnePlus 5?

© 2024 Auto World News, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Get the Most Popular Autoworld Stories in a Weekly Newsletter

Join the Conversation

Real Time Analytics