Intel Corp (INTC)

[chipguy]

how much improvement are you expecting from Zen?

On one hand it is a clean break from the past. OTOH AMD has limited
design resources and relies on external foundry process technology.

I expect it to have a lot better single thread performance and "IPC"
then current AMD products but fall short of Haswell at similar clock
frequency and it will clock slower at the same power. It will still
be well behind Intel in perf/Watt. AMD will probably market 8 core
products against Intel 4 core chips and be pretty competitive in chip
level throughput but at a substantial cost in higher power. I get the
sense that Zen is oriented at traditional server and high end desktop
so it probably won't scale down below 35W very gracefully at all so
it likely won't help much in mobile.

In the end AMD will have to sell based on price. It is a matter of
how much more can they sell it for than their current products vs
how much more does it cost to manufacture than current products.