Is AMD ZEN going to revive the PC processor competition ?
AMD has lost it’s market share these years to Intel. AMD is making a come back with it’s ZEN, which is scheduled for a 1Q 2017 launch.
According to analyst Christopher Danely of Citigroup, they gave Intel a neutral while a sell rating for AMD shares traded on NASDAQ.
He is not convinced by the benchmark which AMD demonstrated using the Zen processor versus the Intel Broadwell-E both running at 3GHz. In the demonstration video, AMD ZEN outperformed the Intel processor by 2% in the Blender rendering benchmark at 48.07 sacs.
He said the tests were done using a AMD controlled benchmark using an engineering sample versus a 3 mths old Intel processor. One benchmark with a custom workload does not represent expected results under all workloads.
He further claimed that Intel released it’s new KabyLake chips on an improved 14nm+ processor this month. It is an optimized version of he 14nm used in Broadwell and SkyLake. The 14nm+ has an improvement of 12% over standard 14nm and is 12% fuster in productivity performance and 19% faster web performance over comparable skylake chips.
In contrast, AMD uses Global Foundries which failed to developed 20nm and 14nm but adopted Samsung 14nm FinFET process. Even though they adopted the recipe, it is one year that they managed to get it right. Furthermore, the partnership doesn’t include Samsunsg’s 10nm or lower nodes. He feels that AMD is playing catch up while Intel is moving way ahead.
AMD closed at $amd $6.55 (+0.18) while $INTL closed at 37.19 (-0.36) on 23 Sep 2016.