10 things you should know about amd zen summit ridge processors

New AMD Zen processors are just around the corner to bring back the competitive brand in the high-end x86 processor market. Although we have been talking about Zen and Summit Ridge for a long time, we bring you a summary of their 10 highlights and to know.

10 key things to know about AMD Zen and Summit Ridge

• Everything is new: AMD Zen is a completely new x86 microarchitecture developed from scratch, promising 40% more performance per clock cycle, a full-core design and SMT technologies to handle two threads of data each core.

• Not a CPU: Summit Ridge Zen-based processors are a SoC, which means that motherboards don't need a chipset by including all the logic necessary for their operation.

• They're eight-core processors: Summit Ridge will arrive with up to 8 cores and 16 processing threads for outstanding performance on multithreaded tasks.

• New motherboards: Summit Ridge needs new motherboards to work, these will be based on the AM4 socket that will unify this platform with the new Zen-based APUs and includes the most modern technologies such as DDR4, USB 3.1 10Gbps, SATA Express, PCIe 3.0 and NVMe natively.

• Your current heatsink could work: despite using a new socket it seems that the current heatsinks will be compatible after having seen a system with an AMD Wraith.

• Manufactured with FinFet technology: AMD Zen is manufactured using Global Foundries' 14nm FinFet process for a huge leap forward in energy efficiency compared to current AMD FX manufactured at 32nm SOI.

• Its performance will be very high: In a recent demo AMD has shown a Summit Ridge processor as fast as an Intel Core i7 6900K.

• There is a 32-core version: AMD Zen brings Naples processors to life with a maximum of 32 cores and 64 threads. There are motherboards with two sockets for up to 128 wires.

• Nothing is known of its price: AMD has not given any details about the prices of the Summit Ridge processors but if their performance is what they promise we will witness a war between Intel and AMD that we have not seen for years.

• You will have to wait until 2017: AMD Zen could be announced in the rest of the year but it is almost certain that you will have to wait until 2017 to buy one of these promising new processors.