AMD Shows Upcoming Zen CPU Beating Intel's Broadwell-E Processor in Benchmark

It’s been several years since AMD has gone toe-to-toe with Intel at the high-end spectrum of the CPU market, but the company assures us that it is back in the enthusiast segment with its upcoming Zen micro-architecture.

Specifically, the company showed off its new Summit Ridge processor last night in an event held in San Francisco, CA. AMD benchmarked its upcoming CPU against Intel’s recently-released $1089 core-i7 6900K Broadwell-E processor. Both chips feature eight physical CPU cores and 16 threads. While AMD wouldn’t reveal the frequency at which Summit Ridge would run at stock clocks, the company did have both CPUs running at 3GHz in an attempt to create a fair apples-to-apples comparison in the open-source Blender benchmark.

Both CPUs ended up finishing the test on stage at roughly the same time, with the Zen chip edging out Intel’s enthusiast processor by a hair. This is surprising given how fast Broadwell-E runs. It will be interesting to see if performance will be similar across a wide array of benchmarks, or if this particular benchmark favors AMD's chip at the moment. It is worth mentioning that Blender is a 3D graphics and animation benchmark that is heavily multi-threaded and loves CPU cores.

While no TDP (thermal design power) for the CPU was revealed, AMD confirmed that the chip would work on the company’s new AM4 motherboard platform, which would support DDR4 RAM.

No pricing for Summit Ridge or the rest of AMD’s upcoming Zen lineup was revealed, but when we pressed Lisa Su for more information, the company’s CEO simply told us that “ASPs (average sale prices) will be higher than current ASPs.”

Zen CPUs are expected to officially launch Q1 of next year.