AMD ZEN Performance Demo. (Photo : YouTube/ Jagat Review)
AMD has been reported to be working on Zen based chipsets that is predicted to be released early in 2017. The California-based company is also said to be developing software.
University Herald had learned that Zen is advertised to put AMD back on the track in manufacturing high-performance processors. Also, it would be remarkable to note that the AMD Zen is a designed-from-scratch CPU employing the x86-processor microarchitecture. The said chipset might also be fabricated featuring a 14nm low-power FinFET.
Moreover, there are rumors suggesting that a desktop PC Zen processor codenamed "Summit Ridge," will hit the market shelves first quarter of 2017. As a reference, Summit Ridge is an eight-core CPU with 16 hardware threads. Experts believe Zencore to perform 40 percent more instructions per cycle than that of its previous high-end processor.
Another chip was spotted under the codename "Naples" which is likely to be branded AMD Opteron, Zen system-on-chip is expected to be made available around the second quarter of 2017. It is expected that Naples chips will appear in dual-socket 32 core systems, with 64 hardware threads, per socket. It is predicted that AMD is drumming support from Microsoft, Canonical, VMware, Citrix, Red Hat and others, for the chip.
Aside from Zen based GPUs, AMD also released software tools. PCWorld reported that AMD has launched the latest version of software tools, called ROCm. This tool will make it easy to write and compile parallel programs for its GPUs and CPUs. It's targeted mainly at high-performance calculating applications.
Moreover, ROCm is somewhat the key to AMD's re-entry into the fast-growing data center market. It also delivers a base for the company to build GPUs for large-scale servers. ROCm is a low-level programming framework like Nvidia's CUDA but unlike the latter it is an open source. Also, it can work with a wide range of CPU architectures like ARM, Power, and x86.
