Zen Brings AMD Closer to Intel Than Ever

2016 may well be the year of the AMD comeback. This year will see the launch of their new Polaris GPU architecture as well as the new Zen CPU architecture. Both developments are expected to provide a major boost to AMD’s fortunes. Zen in particular, is expected to bring a 40%+ IPC increase over Excavator. Speaking to the press, John Taylor, Corporate VP at AMD, expressed confidence in both products.

“By the end of the year, AMD will have moved on, to both its Zen CPU core as well as the Polaris graphics architecture. We are far closer to Intel than ever before – you always need a number two to keep them honest”

According to Taylor, Zen will compete with Intel on performance, power and specifications. This is in addition to the usual AMD price advantage. Furthermore, the comparison was made against Skylake, Intel’s latest CPU architecture. This is much better than previous reports that suggested Haswell/Broadwell parity.

The last time AMD was really close to Intel was in the Core 2 Duo days. Before that, AMD was actually ahead of Intel with their K8 CPUs. Since Taylor only started at AMD since after Core 2 Duo, this suggests we may see a return to near parity with Intel. If Zen is able to pull this off, AMD will have made one of the biggest comebacks ever.