AMD (Photo : Reuters)
Over the years, AMD has slowly lost its market share in the microprocessor industry but the company is poised to make a comeback after a leaked slide shows that it is engineering a 16-core Zen processor.
The image was first released by Fudzilla but was quickly picked up by different blogging sites. According to Fudzilla, each of the 16 core of the Zen processor will have 512 KB of L2 cache. Additionally, four Zen cores will share 8MB L3 cache. If AMD decides to release a 32-thread x86 Zen processor, the L2 cache will be upgraded to 8MB with a 32MB L3 cache.
AMD's new APU will have an integrated Greenland Graphics and Multimedia Engine with high bandwidth memory (HBM). Based on the leaked slide, it can support up to 16GB of HBM with interposer speed of up to 512GB/second. An enhanced ECC and RAS along with HAS support will be available to the new APU.
According to TechSpot, the new APU will have a four-channel DDR4 support with error-correcting code speed computed at around 3,200MHz. It can also support as much as 256GB of RAM per channel.
If these figures are true, AMD is betting big for its future and as reported by Digital Trends it is a "go big or go out" gamble for the company. Additional speculation suggests that AMD will release the APU sometime in 2016. This is a considerable estimate and the date could be pushed back depending on design issues and other unforeseen problem in the future.
AMD has yet to confirm these rumors but further examination of the leaked slide proves its legitimacy.
