The CPU Market When it comes to the CPU market, a great deal of confidence has been put on #AMD 's new " #Zen " core. This confidence was recently boosted by AMD showing off a AMD 8-(Zen core) chip supposedly beating a top-of-the-line Intel 6900K 8-core chip in a bender rendering job. However, I believe there's a very large reason to doubt the Zen-based chips will live up to the expectations put on them. These expectations are more or less as follows: Zen will gain ~40% in IPC (instructions per clock) when compared to previous "excavator"-based AMD chips. Zen will enable AMD to make chips competitive with directly spec'd (number of cores and frequency) Intel chips. Zen will allow for much better power efficiency Put these together and what comes out is that AMD would be positioned to bring the battle to Intel (NASDAQ:INTC). If this was true, Intel would take a beating (as I've said in my previous article). However, in this article I will put forward a reason why I believe the Zen core-based chips will surprisingly disappoint (based on existing information). The Reason - The Market Is Assuming What It Can't Assume When we see comparisons between the existing AMD chips and the Zen-based ones, they usually go like this: OMG, look how much faster Zen goes! For instance, in the Ashes of the Singularity benchmark, the 8-core Zen chip attains a 58 "CPU Framerate" whereas the AMD FX8350, also 8-core, attains just 42. This is already a 38% gain for Zen versus the older 8-core AMD CPU. This is followed by "and this is just an engineering sample," the Zen CPU is running at 2.8GHz/3.2 Ghz, while the FX8350 is a 4.0/4.2Ghz chip. So the performance advantage would be even greater once the Zen sees ramped up frequencies.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/4002864-amd-zen-likely-good-enough
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