A slide revealed at an AMD investor meeting shows comparative performance between AMD's eagerly anticipated Zen CPUs and earlier generation processors from the chipmaker. Of the two comparative graphs revealed in the slide, the most interesting is on the right, where we see that the 'Summit' processor for high end desktops appears to provide double the 'Orochi' score in Cinebench multi-threaded compute tests. Summit Ridge processors include AMD Zen CPUs and Orochi is the codename for the AMD FX 8350 CPU.
Tech site WCCFTech uncovered the above slide and did a bit of maths based upon the graphs. It came to the conclusion that the upcoming Zen CPU, as performance charted above, will be direct competition for the octa-core Intel Core i7 5960X. There's quite a lot of assumptions in there, considering the sketchy graphs, with the one on the right probably (but not necessarily) sharing the same axes/scale as the other graph.
On the topic of the upcoming Zen processors, a wafer shot of AMD's octa-core Summit die is thought to have been 'accidentally' revealed by AMD at its shareholder's meeting earlier this month. Tech commentators over at SemiAccurate are largely of the opinion that the wafer shot reveals that each Zen module will comprise of; four cores, an L3 cache in the centre and a DDR4 interface on top, with a South Bridge to the top right. Furthermore some suggest that on the bottom right of the chip is a Global Memory Interconnect (GMI) for chip-to-chip communication.
It will likely be the end of this year before we see Zen-based high end desktop processors. AMD does have new desktop processors to show us soon though, the "launch of 7th Generation AMD A-Series Processors, Polaris updates and more," are scheduled for Computex in less than a week.
