It's been a long time since AMD was really competitive on performance with Intel, but this next-generation of CPUs from the red team might finally bring the fight back to its chip giant rival.
Yes Zen may be the turning point in an industry where Intel has grown complacent about its status as top dog. In early benchmarks, AMD's Zen competes favourably. In a recent showing, AMD showed off Zen as capable of delivering 40 percent better per clock than previous generations of AMD hardware.
Not only that though, but it showed a head to head between a new, Zen Summit Ridge CPU with 8 cores, 16 threads, and a Broadwell E Core-i7 with the same number, competing very evenly. This is clock for clock and the Zen CPU is set at 3.0GHz for now, but we would expect that figure to rise in the coming months as development continues and cooling options improve.
AMD will offer a full range of Zen chips when they finally debut, with everything from server chips, right through enthusiast desktops, to laptops, low end tablets and mobile. It's hitting every point and will offer strong competition against all competitors at all price points - supposedly.
That's quite a hard target to aim for, especially since high performance probably means AMD won't be as competitive as it usually is on price. But it needs to bring the fight to Intel to force that competitive development which so drove forward the Conroe developments back in the mid '00s.
