Over the past few months, AMD has been very vocal about their forthcoming processor architecture code named “Zen.” It’s quite clear the company not only urgently needs it to be successful but is growing more confident every day in the likelihood of its success. At its analyst day back in May last year, the company went on record with bold claims for Zen underscoring a 40 percent IPC (Instructions Per Clock) throughput increase (over AMD’s previous generation Excavator core) and a return to competitive performance versus Intel in the high-end. One of the ways AMD is striving to achieve such herculean feats is by competing with Intel’s semiconductor manufacturing prowess on a low power 14nm (nanometer) FinFET process, whereas the company’s current generation technology is built on workhorse 28nm nodes. There are just no two ways about it, to compete with Intel, you have to at least attempt to compete with their process advantage and 28nm won’t even come close to cutting it. 14nm, on the other than, will bring a world of opportunities to AMD and Zen, not the least of which is simply smaller CPU core die geometries.

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