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Now, finally, you start to ask the right questions
Oh Oh, Zen looks to be pretty fast:
To give us a sense of Summit Ridge's performance, AMD pitted it against a Core i7-6900K, Intel's top-of-the-line 8-core chip (which currently sells for around $1,100), using the Blender rendering benchmark. With both chips clocked at 3Ghz, the Summit Ridge machine managed to finish rendering a scene around half-a-second faster than Intel's processor. AMD had to downclock its competitor from 3.2GHz to make the fight fair, but the benchmark as still a notable win. We also saw Summit Ridge, together with AMD's R9 Fury X, playing Deux Ex: Mankind Divided in 4K with smooth frame rates (of course, we weren't told the exact FPS figure).
Now, this is a single data point and still not outperforming Intel's high end chips, but, at least with this benchmark, would be very close to what Intel offers - for a lot of money that is. I always felt uncomfortable with Intel concentrating too much on low power and giving its main competitor the chance to overtake on the right lane. It's 14nm by the way, so basically a Samsung process.
It's still way too early to know what this means for the market, but AMD might have some nice iron at least for desktops. The main question, regarding market share, remains whether they'll have something competitive for higher priced notebooks and ultrabooks. The gaming people typically don't care much for price as long as they get the best platform, which will still be Intel as it seems. Office people don't buy AMD so the remaining market to compete for would be mid priced non business desktops - hardly a big market. But we'll see how AMD did with power efficiency - I kind of doubt it can match Intel there, though.
In any case, this seems to be a clear winner for the coming generation of gaming consoles. Important market for AMD.
A somewaht interesting comment on the Seeking-Alpha announcement on Intels foundry plans;
From the Samsung Electronics conference call:
On a quick glance, I don't like the results. Basically everything is down or only slowly growing. Data center had only minor growth, same for IoT. NVM is margin depressed (ok, that has been known) and how Altera is actually doing is an unknown, due to accounting changes. I suppose the Stratix 10 disaster drags it, though.
Here's what Krzanich had to say about it:
Some story out of real life, just to bring us all down:
We are using FPGAs for ASIC prototyping. For many years, we were using Altera, simply because they had the best solution for ASIC prototyping in the market and usually the FPGAs with the highest logic element density. Now, we are, again, at the limit of what the current Altera FPGAs can contain as logic. So, Altera, now Intel, has announced the Stratix 10 since when? A year ago? Now it is shifted to next year, open end. Now we are seriously considering using Xilinx, even though it would cause a huge effort to adapt to the new tools and boards.
Just as a reminder how competitive this industry is and what a delay of 1-2 years does to your market share. Intel better hurry, or they have one more expensive acquisition screwed up ...
Some words from Krzanich about mobile at the Sanford conference. Seems like the "rumours" are actually true:
Thanks for sharing that info (though you certainly cherry picked the bad stuff)!