Ever since AMD announced the new Ryzen processors in early December, there has been a steady stream of information leaks, alleged benchmarks, and even a handful of possible stock keeping units a few days ago. So it should come as no surprise that a handful of slides have made their way onto the web going more in-depth with AMD’s latest and greatest.
In fact, it appears most of the presentation is uploaded on the Japanese site PC Watch despite the fact that none of the information was intended for the public, at least yet. There is a lot to parse through there and a lot of it is overly technical, but at least a few slides may have implications on the end-user experience.
Notably, AMD takes the time to compare the new Zen core with an unnamed-but-probably-Intel competing chip. Not only does the Zen die come in at a slightly smaller footprint than the competitor, which is also 14nm, but it manages to squeeze in L2 cache much more efficiently.
There is also some information on the way the Zen chips handle heat and power. Through a combination of more than 1,300 path monitors, 48 power supply monitors, 20 thermal diodes, and nine droop detectors, the chip is constantly gathering massive amounts of data. This usage data can be flipped back around and used for identifying stronger cores, providing perfect power to every part of the chip, and pushing clock speeds to their absolute maximum.
There are some other interesting facts stashed away among the slides. The Zen architecture will adopt simultaneous multithreading, a more traditional multi-tasking process akin to Intel’s Hyper-Threading. Per-core voltage and frequency control appear to be platform-wide features and despite a huge possible voltage range, all chips carry a 3.4GHz or higher base clock speed.
While it is always good to take leaks and rumors with a grain of salt, it is hard to see much benefit in leaking fake processor technicalities. We are also close enough to an alleged release that this sort of information should be making its way to possible partners and engineers. These modern features should help accelerate the hype on an already promising release and, if they are true, we’ll know soon enough.
After five years with Apple silicon, from the original M1 MacBook Air to the M5 MacBook Air released earlier this year, I've watched these chips mature not just on the spec sheet, but in real-world workflows and overall efficiency.
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In 1950, Alan Turing asked whether machines can think. Rather than argue over definitions, he turned the question into a party game, where an interrogator trades typed messages with hidden players and tries to work out who is who. Since then, chatbots have gotten so good that they have already fooled humans in modern versions of the test.
So, four researchers from Paris Cité University asked the obvious follow-up question in a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports: can AI at least catch its own kind?