Quote:Both AMD and Nvidia, among others, have talked about and been working on implementations of stacked memory architectures, but AMD will be the first to ship. Lisa Su said that it’s been in development for a long time, and the decision to put it into production now was predicated on both the necessity and fit for a high-end graphics part, and because the volume shipments expected with the new GPU should help push HBM down the cost curve so that it’s applicable to other implementations and products. Surprisingly, AMD made this decision 18 months ago, Su told us.

As to why AMD chose to announce the new graphics flagship at E3 instead of Computex, she pointed to the fact that Carrizo was the right move for last week’s trade show because of the heavy hardware OEM involvement. Because E3 is all about gaming, and gaming is a big focus of the next graphics launch (and for AMD overall), E3 makes more sense as a launch vehicle.

Quote:During last month's financial analyst day, AMD outlined a few details about Zen. First, that Zen will come sometime in 2016. Second, that it would be based on a new FinFET process that the company said will scale from the client to the server. It also said that its architecture would abandon the Clustered Multi-Threading (CMT) approach of the Bulldozer design and move to the more traditional Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) approach.

The goal will be to push IPC some 40% higher, and its new cache system will improve in both bandwidth and latency. We've been privy to no details on how all of this is accomplished, nor details of the FinFET process (which many assume will be 14nm), nor details on the exact timing. Su did tell us that we’ll see Zen first on the desktop, however.