Rumours have surfaced that AMD’s next line of CPU’s (codenamed “Zen”) are soon to be released, perhaps in Q2 or Q3 2015, and will be based on 14 nm manufacturing processes. The chips are also rumoured to support PCIE 3.0, have up to 8 cores, and be based on the TBA FM3 platform.
The new CPU’s are rumoured to have up to 8 cores, and support for DDR4 and PCIE 3.0 on the to-be-released FM3 platform. This may mean AMD’s return to the high performance CPU market, which has, for some time now, been dominated by Intel. This means that AMD, with the release of the “Zen” architecture, may make two things happen. First, DDR4 has yet to be widely used, and if AMD can grab the lower-end market for DDR4 platforms, DDR4 may become widely used. This could force Intel to also release a consumer-grade DDR4 series of CPU’s. Secondly, if AMD pulls the manufacturing process and CPU manufacturing off right, AMD could once again be the top dog in CPU performance, something that has not happened for quite some time.
Another significant thing to note about these new CPU’s is that the maximum TDP is rumoured to be only 95 watts, which is very impressive considering the last AMD 8-core had a rating of nearly 250 watts, almost triple that! This could mean impressive gains on AMD’s side in power consumption. This could lead to significantly better performance, with less power consumption, more overclocking head room, and better cost to performance ratios across the board. For example, the AMD FX 9590, with a 250 watt TDP, needed a bare minimum of a watercooling unit, and to keep it truly cool needed custom watercooling setups. With only a 95 watt TDP, these new CPU’s will not need nearly as much to stay cool, and will overclock significantly better.
