AMD’s Zen Cannot Rival Intel’s Products, Says CPU Guru David Kanter

The upcoming release of AMD’s Zen processor architecture alongside the Ryzen line of CPUs is met with high enthusiasm. The new line is believed to bury Intel’s latest Core processors, namely its seventh generation Kaby Lake.

As such, the Internet is awash with opinions on how exactly AMD’s Zen would compete against Intel’s products. In an in-depth report of CPU guru David Kanter published at the official website if The Linley Group, he said that the microarchitecture of Zen offers a considerable fresh start for AMD.

Considering that Zen is AMD’s first CPU in a FinFET node that offers a 40% higher IPC and power efficiency compared to its predecessors, it opened up possibilities for more competitive x86 products this 2017. While this seems attractive, the SPEC CPU scores that have been provided, however, has revealed that Zen fall short of Skylake.

Based on the estimates of the performance of recent x86 desktop processors, it has been calculated that Zen’s performance is relatively similar to Intel’s Ivy Bridge and behind Haswell and Skylake. As such, Kanter concluded that Zen-based processors are unlikely to rival the latest Skylake core processor in high-end clients.

The AMD’s eight-core Summit Ridge chip, on the other hand, can be a credible contender for midrange desktops. Kanter added that although Naples will boast more cores than Intel’s 28-core Skylake-EP, Intel still own the upper hand in terms of performance and power-efficiency.

On another benchmark report, however, from VCZ based on Futuremark’s 3DMark suite, the multi-core overall physics score of AMD’s Zen outperformed every single other CPU except Intel’s 10-core i7 6950X. The physics test examined the hardware’s ability to run gameplay simulations on the CPU. The media outlet noted that while Kaby Lake CPUs garnered higher scores, the fact that Ryzen offers much more scores bridged the gap.

For further details and more accurate understanding about the AMD Ryzen, the video of David Kanter’s interview can be watched below. Stay tuned for more exciting updates!