After the Radeon "Fury" fizzled AMD bets everything on "Zen"

Sep 23, 2015 12:30 GMT  ·  By

AMD's future "Zen" architecture is the centerpiece of the company's future processor development. The fact that Jim Keller left the company a few days ago has put a shadow on the APU's future roadmap. Now it seems that's not really the case.

AMD has been always the sort of company that managed to survive in a fiercely competitive world, being a master at brinkmanship against giants like Intel and NVIDIA by employing sharp undercuts, pioneering new technologies and filling price gaps with countless intermediary products.

This time, however, AMD finds itself in another crisis. Being in a financial freefall and being forced to restructure itself, the American company needs a powerful and popular product to hit the markets in order the get back in the game against Intel, at least.

The new "Zen" microarchitecture is touted as being a completely new micro-architecture that promises to be very competitive. To emphasize this, the management team declared for My Statesman that they got a lot of freedom with the new CPU design. Although Jim Keller, the leading figure in Zen's development, was missing from the story coverage, many AMD engineers declared their joy and satisfaction working on the new architecture.

Suzanne Plummer, a veteran Austin engineer that led the "Zen" development says that "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."

AMD allows complete freedom to its engineers to create the best possible

To emphasize the eventual success of the "Zen," Mrs. Plummer adds that "It’s like a marathon effort with some sprints in the middle. The team is working very hard, but they can see the finish line. I guarantee that it will deliver a huge improvement in performance and (low) power consumption over the previous generation."

The first "Zen" processor will come out in October 2016 and will be called "Summit Ridge." The chip is aimed at high-end desktops and servers and will offer at least 40% performance improvement at the same clock rate compared to existing cores.

AMD hopes the new CPU will be on par with the existing Intel products, more specifically, the "Skylake." The American company hopes the new "Zen" will be a hit, otherwise AMD's stock prices will fall even further, and the performance gap between itself and Intel will be irrecoverable.