AMD's "Zen" chip could have 16 cores, but is it for real?

Rumors suggest AMD is eyeing a comeback with its new 16-core chip

We all know by this point that AMD has been fighting an uphill battle over the past few years. The company has struggled to stay relevant with consumers as Intel continues to dominate nearly every sector of the market. AMD is barely keeping pace with its rival’s massive R&D budget, and it shows in the chips it offers. Very few are a competitive value, and none can challenge Intel’s quickest.

But, despite seventeen-or-so lackluster sales quarters in a row, AMD may finally be primed to turn their luck around – if a leaked slide acquired by Fudzilla is to be believed.

Image Credit: Fudzilla

The slide, which is already being called into question by various sources, looks to be legitimate on the surface. It contains details about AMD’s long-rumored Zen core APU, as well as the Greenland HBM (high-bandwidth memory) stream processor featuring a massive 16GB of memory to spare. Supposedly the chip will be equipped with upwards of 16 “Zen” x86 cores, each of which could support two threads each.

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Further technicals include 512KB of L2 cache, while each cluster of the Zen’s four cores will share an 8MB L3 cache. As any math majors out there have probably already figured out, when amped up to the possible 16-cores, this means that this chip could carry 8MB of L2 cache, and 32MB of L3. That’s a lot of cache. If you’re in the position like AMD’s been in lately, go big or go out of business are the only options.

The list of exciting possibilities continues with quad-channel DDR4 RAM (up to 3,200MHz), with a whopping 256GB of available memory per channel.

Other features to note are the APU’s 64 lanes of available third generation PCI Express channels, which can switch with SATA on the fly (sharing a max of 16), along with support for the company’s crypto co-processor and secure boot feature, made with the enterprise market in mind.

As far as a release schedule is concerned, rumors suggest AMD will roll out “Zen” sometime in 2016. It should be noted, though, that this information comes only from leaked slides, and even if accurate a release so far away can easily be pushed back due to design issues. Whatever the plan may be, we hope to see this chip sooner rather than later. Perhaps it could give AMD a fighting chance.

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