Do you remember the words about Zen of Suzanne Plummer, Director of Design Engineering at AMD and a veteran Austin chip engineer? “It is the first time in a very long time that we engineers have been given the total freedom to build a processor from scratch and do the best we can do”.
Also, do you remember the words of Mike Clark, senior fellow at AMD? Clark said Zen isn't the first chip he's helped design from scratch—he was part of the team that developed AMD's K5 processor almost two decades ago. But it's never easy. "For me, it wasn't the first time, but you don't do it often because it is so daunting," he said. "It's going to take a lot of [effort] and time. … It comes with a lot of risk”.
Last, but not the least, the Keller words: “We know how to do small dense cores and we know how to do high frequency. What I've asked the team to do is take the DNA from both”.
After the show of Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, we can say that AMD has made a miracle (Like AMD did with K7 and K8), just like our sources told us during the lastest months:
Zen SMT it's more advanced than Skylake SMT → Check
Broadwell IPC level & If 14nm LPP will be good, Zen base frequency (8 cores version, TDP 95W) will be 3.7-3.8 GHz. Turbo 4.1-4.2 GHz → Check & Almost Check
Jim Keller leaves AMD: Zen is completed and it will be powerful → Check
Other leaks here: Bits And Chips, a small but reliable IT site
Also, a quote from our article (2 April 2016): "Last, but not the least, the part of the news about Intel was true. It seems that Intel will commercialize a 10 cores Broadwell-E due to its own internal Zen simulations (Intel has some data we don't know, yet, and has skilled engineers that know what they do). Zen will have 8 cores, while Broadwell-E 10 cores. So, Intel will have the “King of the Hill”, but Zen seems to be very good in the mid range of the market (AKA, gaming and enthusiast configurations)".
According to this presentation, “Zen/Ryzen” will be as fast as Broadwell uArch CPUs and it will have a lower power consumption of 6th Generation HEDT SKUs. In Handbrake and Blnder benchmarks, Zen @ 3.4 GHz w/o Turbo is faster than i7-6900K with Turbo enabled (3.2/3.7 GHz).
Also, as we said during the last months, Zen is a High Frequency & High IPC uArch, so we will see higher clocked SKUs. Overclockers will have a lot of fun thanks to a soldered IHS, too.
However the best is yet to come. I can't say anymore. ;)
Good job, AMD.