At a CERN Conference, a speaker rumoured that AMD is planning on releasing 32-core CPUs in their latest Zen Processor series. While the very concept of Zen processing is still nebulous and people are raising all sorts of questions and rumours about the functionality, this new concept comes out as very interesting.
32-core CPUs are not unheard-of; the basic concept involved is decades old, but the chips were primarily meant for supercomputers or clusters or mainframe servers. However, 32-core CPUs for PC is a new thing. Even Intel offers only up to 18 cores in CPUs, that off the Intel Xeon D series, and has plans for 22 core processors that have not yet been released.
According to the speaker at CERN, the processor uses 14 finFET technology, which, similar to Intel’s Broadwell architecture, allows for further cores. If the rumours are correct, the software also plans to bring about a 40 per cent improvement in clocking efficiency, making it a very fast and low power consumption CPU. There is also the mention of Symmetrical Multi-Threading, which is interesting to be heard from AMD because it’s one of the few things in which the company loses to Intel. The gadget supports eight DDR4 Channels (RAM) as well as PCIe Gen 3.0 ports.
Some bloggers, specifically Digitaltrends, have expressed astonishment at the idea of a 32-core CPU aimed solely for the PC, saying that such powerful processors are only required for mainframes and servers. However, the news of their inception tells us that the concept behind the Zen Processors is actually starting to take shape.