AMD has announced at a ‘fan event’ new high performance CPUs based on its ‘Zen’ archicture and also revealed Ryzen as the new brand for Zen-based desktop and notebook processor families. AMD also gave some info on its SenseMI technologies.
AMD said that SenseMI technology is an enabler of an increase of greater than 40% in instructions per clock, and is comprised of five components:
- Pure Power – more than 100 embedded sensors with accuracy claimed to the millivolt, milliwatt, and single degree level of temperature are designed to enable optimal voltage, clock frequency, and operating mode with minimal energy consumption;
- Precision Boost – smart logic that monitors integrated sensors and optimizes clock speeds, in increments as small as 25MHz, at up to a thousand times a second;
- Extended Frequency Range (XFR) – when the system senses added cooling capability, XFR raises the Precision Boost frequency to enhance performance;
- Neural Net Prediction – an artificial intelligence neural network that learns to predict what future pathway an application will take based on past runs;
- Smart Prefetch – sophisticated learning algorithms that track software behavior to anticipate the needs of an application and prepare the data in advance.
Jim Anderson, senior VP and GM, Computing and Graphics Group, AMD, commented: “The desktop market is hungry for change as new and demanding use cases like VR, 3D modeling, and eSports require intense amounts of processing and graphics power. We designed Ryzen processors to excel in these areas and to bring much-needed innovation and competition back to desktop PCs”.
AMD Ryzen processors for desktops are expected to be available beginning in Q1 2017 and AMD Ryzen notebook processors are planned to launch in 2H 2017. The company claimed that:
- For the first time, the upcoming Vega GPU architecture was demonstrated live to fans, powered by Ryzen playing Star Wars Battlefront – Rogue One at UltraHD resolution with smooth, high framerates.
- Blender- and Handbrake-based image rendering and video transcoding demos showed that the new CPU can match or outperform the Intel Core i7 6900K – also an 8-core, 16-thread processor – in many complex creative tasks. The 140-watt TDP Core i7 6900K ran at stock processor speed and boost against a 95-watt TDP Ryzen processor at 3.4 GHz without boost, showing the computing power and performance-per-watt efficiency of Ryzen.
- Again at 3.4 GHz, Ryzen was shown beating the game framerates of a Core i7 6900K playing Battlefield 1 at UltraHD resolution, with each CPU paired to an Nvidia Titan X GPU.
