If you’ve spent anytime yesterday catching up on tech news, you couldn’t have missed AMD’s Ryzen launch. In a single stroke, AMD has made the first steps to a stellar comeback in the x86 CPU market. The culmination of 4 years of work has finally paid off with the spectacular Zen architecture.
First up, we have AMD’s original goal of 40% IPC gain on top of their Excavator architecture. That was shattered and we are being treated to an incredible 52% IPC increase from day one. AMD’s team really did a number and combined with SMT, this is what is making Ryzen so competitive. As we’ve covered before, Zen really is a ground up redesign and brings a whole host of efficiency and performance improvements.
In total, the 8 core 2x CCX Ryzen die features 4.8 billion transistors and over 200m of internal wiring. This really speaks to the complexity and sophistication of Ryzen, with 4 times the transistor count of the 8 core Bulldozer CPU. It also 2 million more than 8 core Haswell i7 which is perhaps why AMD is able to pull ahead and seize the performance crown. Despite this, the core size is still smaller than Intel’s Skylake.
When it comes to both single threaded and multi threaded performance, Ryzen is no slouch, matching Broadwell-E pretty much clock for clock. Of course, we will have to see performance in a wide range of workloads to crown the overall winner. Hopefully, we will get a better understanding of this once we get our hands on the chips. With prices peaking at half of what Intel is demanding, Ryzen is bringing disruption and competition once more to the CPU market.
