AMD’s Zen CPU is now called Ryzen, and it might actually challenge Intel
AMD's Zen CPU core architecture is now called Ryzen (pronounced rye-zen, not rizen). Perhaps more importantly, though, as we creep towards Ryzen's promised Q1 2017 release date, AMD has finally revealed some solid specs for a chip based on Ryzen cores.
The first Ryzen-based part will be the Summit Ridge family of high-end desktop chips. Summit Ridge chips will feature an 8-core 16-thread CPU—which is a true 8-core chip using simultaneous multithreading instead of the much maligned clustered multithreading of Bulldozer—with the top-end part sporting a base clock of 3.4GHz. While that isn't as speedy as Intel's latest quad-core desktop parts (the i7-6700K has a base clock of 4GHz), it is more than competitive with Intel's 8C/16T Broadwell-E processor, which has a base clock of 3.2GHz.
Of course, clock speed isn't everything (otherwise, we'd still all be rocking Pentium 4 processors), but there was a concern that Ryzen's clock speeds would be way off the mark, somewhat negating the promised 40 percent improvement to instructions-per-clock (IPC). That AMD is hitting good clock speeds—and is doing it at under 100W TDP, far below the 140W TDP of Broadwell-E—is extremely promising.
