Potential buyers of AMD’s next generation Zen CPU may have a bit of a wait time ahead of them. According to DigiTimes and its insider sources, the AMD’s Zen-based CPUs may not arrive until Q4 2016 at the earliest.
According to motherboard manufactures, the delay was caused by poor yield rates of 14nm FinFet transistors and issues with Research and Development from Global Foundries. They have expressed concerns for AMD ‘s competitiveness after the chip maker reported a $360 million loss for the first half of 2015. Global Foundries has had a difficult time in stabilizing the yield rate for its 14nm FinFETs, but has recently announced that it was able to achieve high-volume production.
The Zen architecture will be built using 14nm FinFETs. AMD will be focusing on increasing its Instruction Per Clock (IPC) capability as opposed to increasing its core count and frequencies. It’s also rumoured to ditch the Clustered Multi-threading (CMT) design introduced in the Bulldozer architecture in favour of the Simultaneous Multi-threading approach. This could potentially mean a decrease in both die size and physical core count and an increase in efficiency.
Source: DigiTimes
AMD needs to release the current FX chip on 28nm on AM3+ as soon as possible with a little tweaking to improve its performance, like a tweak to the memory or caches. How about 5 GHz with much more reasonable power consumption? It’s just not acceptable to wait this long for Zen. Even die-hard AMD fans are going to jump ship to Intel before waiting a fourth year to get a better-performing CPU. 32nm is too old. Besides, CMT is becoming a lot more viable under Windows 10 with DX 12. It’s pretty silly that AMD is abandoning it now that gaming is finally catching up.
Unfortunately I’m one of those who jumped ship. I had a FX 8120, it was a great chip, but I just don’t understand how they get blown away in single core performance even when pitted up against Intel’s entry line. My i7 4790K runs rings around my old FX 8120 at the same clock speeds, and unfortunately even piledriver and excavator didn’t improve much on the bulldozer architecture. Plus motherboard manufacturers really gimp AMD’s CPU’s. I’d have a 9590 in my mini ITX, if they had a AM3+ board, but nooooo. Bolton D4 is the best option and cores that support it, like Kaveri and Godavari, fell short of my expectations.
Such as the “12 compute cores”. I was really hoping it would be a hybrid chip that could run all 12 as CPU cores when on dedicated graphics. Nope.
Sadly when Zen does come out, Intel will be ready with the next round of chip releases.