AMD will release the Zen and it looks to shake things up with rival Intel. (Photo : Getty Images/Justin Sullivan)
In terms to central processing units for laptops and personal computers, Intel has arguably won the battle against other tech giants; however, with the upcoming Zen model by Advanced Micro Devices, AMD looks to go toe-to-toe with their big blue rivals.
In AMD's website, Zen is described to be "an all-new, clean sheet, high-performance x86 core" that "is designed for maximum data throughput and instruction execution plus high bandwidth, low latency cache-memory support for optimal compute efficiency."
Technology reviewing site PC Gamer compared Zen to Intel's Core architecture, with the clustered multi-threading gone and will be replaced by a 4-core/8-thread symmetric multi-threading building block.
AMD claims that the Zen runs 40 percent higher than their Excavator model. The same publication tested the Excavator and it runs up to 4.3 GHz and scores 97 points in the single-threaded Cinebench 15 test.
Based on the notion that Zen runs 40 percent higher than the Excavator, the new AMD model will score around 140 points; however, compared to the Haswell/Devil's Canyon Core i7-4790K (4.4GHz) which got 173 points, the Skylake i7-6700K (4.2GHz) which has a 182 mark and the Broadwell-E i7-6900K (3.7GHz) which netted 153 points, Zen still falls short of Intel's performance supposing it runs at 4.3GHz.
SMT improves the i7-6700K by 30 percent and should SMT give the same boost to Zen, an SR5 part would give Intel's Core i5 parts a run for its money. Also, if SMT could project the same improvement into an SR7, the i7-6700K would be defeated.
In terms of frames per second, Zen, which scored 58 fps, edged i5-4670K's 52.6 fps. However, Zen still runs behind the Core i7-4790K which has an fps of 65.4, WCCFTech reported.
Zen is rumored to have a retail price of around $500 and is expected to release early next year. Compared to the Zen, Intel's Intel Core i7-6700K retails at $350.
