AMD to offer up to 32 cores on the desktop with forthcoming Zen releases

Leaks indicate how AMD plans to take on Intel in high-performance desktop and server computing

An engineer at CERN, the European scientific laboratory, has inadvertently revealed details of Zen, AMD's long-trailed bid to "re-enter" the high-performance x86 desktop and server market.

CERN computer engineer Liviu Valsan has detailed how the forthcoming Zen-based Opterons from AMD will feature up to 32 physical cores and symmetric multi-threading. According to Valsan, AMD will use two 16-core CPUs on a single die with a "next generation" interconnect. The microarchitecture will support DDR4 RAM, which was released during 2014.

It will also be built using the 14 nanometre FinFET technology, bringing it up to par with Intel's Broadwell and Skylake microarchitectures. Intel Broadwell had been demonstrated in 2013, although Broadwell-based desktop CPUs only started shipping during 2015.

Zen-based CPUs and APUs will unify around Socket AM4 in a bid to reduce system builder and customer frustrations, and a Zen FX line of CPUs, meanwhile, has been slated for a fourth quarter 2016 release.

Valsan inadvertently leaked the details during a presentation on technology and market trends in the data centre late last week. AMD is unlikely to complain, though, as the leak has arguably gathered more attention over AMD's upcoming release plans than anything its own marketing people could've cooked up on their own.

The Inquirer reported on AMD's plans back in May last year: back then, AMD claimed that Zen would improve instructions per clock by up to 40 per cent compared with AMD's current Bulldozer x86 processor core, and feature simultaneous multi-threading for higher throughput and a new cache subsystem.

AMD said that it will be a high-bandwidth, low-latency cache system and that the first Zen-based silicon will arrive in 2016. This will be based on a fabrication process that uses FinFETs, or 3D transistors, to allow faster switching speeds and lower voltage operation compared with Planar transistors.

That information had been revealed as part of AMD's product roadmap for the next few years and discussed at its 2015 Financial Analyst day.