AMD Ryzen 8 Core Zen Enthusiast CPU Leaked

With a matter of hours to go until the New Horizons event, some more leaks about AMD’s Zen has surfaced. As many of you all now by now, AMD is set to launch their new series of processors based off of their Zen architecture. After lagging behind Intel for quite a few years, AMD is promising that Zen will be much more competitive. According to the leak, Ryzen will be the 8 core 16 thread flagship enthusiast chip to launch first.

Ryzen is set to arrive in Q1 2017 which some reports have pinned down as mid-January. Featuring a massive 20 MB  of L3 cache, the chip offers up 8 full cores with 16 threads via SMT. The clock speed is supposed to be 3.4 GHz+ so we don’t have an upper bound for that. I suspect the 3.4 GHz is the base speed which is somewhat reasonable given the new 14nm process. There is also the new AMD SenseMI Technology but no word yet on what that actually is.

In order to get the most out of the chip, AMD has also introduced their new Extended Frequency Range or XFR. This appears to be an even more aggressive form of boost clocking. The solution appears to be based off CPU temperatures, with no hard upper limit it seems. I suspect AMD will be heavily binning, and testing their chips to develop a temperature-based clock curve. It will be interesting to see if AMD will end up advertising a maximum boost clock or leave with just a + sign at the end.

XFR will work in tangent with Precision Boost which is their new CPU boosting feature. It looks a lot like Intel’s latest enhanced speed step with fine grained and smooth transitions. Both Precision Boost and XFR get their sensor inputs from the new Pure Power. Monitoring temperature, voltage, and clock speed, Pure Power will allow for real-time adaptive control. I am hoping AMD will allow user control for this but somehow, I doubt it.

Lastly, we have Smart Prefetch which is the new Prefetcher. This isn’t that big of a development as prefetchers have always been a focus of improvement in every new CPU. Intel does have the industry lead on prefetching so it will be interesting to see what AMD has done. Judging from the incoherence between the slides, I am more than certain that more will come, likely in just a few hours at New Horizons so stay tuned!