AMD is pinning a great deal on its Zen processors due out this year, but fortunately the more we hear about them, the more promising their overall chances seem.
And some further info has been leaked out, courtesy of a CERN engineer who gave a talk at the IT Technical Forum on market trends concerning data centres, as spotted by Tech Report.
The engineer, who had evidently been provided with some details by AMD, said that Zen CPUs will have up to 32 physical cores (in a single package, spread over two 16-core modules) and will benefit from Symmetrical Multi-Threading, which would seem to be AMD's own version of Intel's Hyper-Threading.
Digging deeper
Zen will apparently support 8-channel DDR4, and the presenter also reiterated some older information, including the fact that these new CPUs can handle 40% more instructions per clock than the current Excavator cores.
Sadly there was no fresh news on the timeframe when we can expect the release of Zen, and all we know is that it will be later this year. The first processors to emerge will be the powerhouse FX desktop CPUs which will likely debut in four, six and eight-core variants.
It will certainly be good for Intel to have some competition, because if some genuine rivalry can be sparked up again, that can only be a good thing for the processor market.
