Question GN visits AMD engineering, talks Zen History with engineers

[Heartbreaker]

For CPU nerds, some interesting history from first Zen to X3d:

 

[DrMrLordX]

Dude has a 5950x3D with two 3d cache CCDs. Sweet. I still kinda wish they had released that.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Dude has a 5950x3D with two 3d cache CCDs. Sweet. I still kinda wish they had released that.

I wonder who gets to keep that. AMD isn't the kind of company that would take all the exotic limited edition CPUs from their employees and lock them up in some vault, right? RIGHT????

 

[Thunder 57]

I thought it was a good video. From saying how it was make it or else to the first samples that could only run memory at 18 MHz. At first I thought they meant 1833MHz or something like that. No wonder the first Zen's had poor memory controllers.

 

[burninatortech4]

Pretty cool video. I suspect 2700X was the goal for Zen 1 but they needed to release early to keep the company alive. My 1700 was a serious upgrade from my old 7870k but it was unstable as hell on anything other than stock and 2666mhz DDR4.

 

[Thunder 57]

Pretty cool video. I suspect 2700X was the goal for Zen 1 but they needed to release early to keep the company alive. My 1700 was a serious upgrade from my old 7870k but it was unstable as hell on anything other than stock and 2666mhz DDR4.

I've always thought that Zen+ is what the original Zen was supposed to be. Zen+ is very much a refined Zen rather than a true upgrade. I thought the same thing, that they had something good enough to sell and put it out so they could get some much needed revenue.

 

[Mopetar]

Zen didn't have the strongest core, but it was good enough considering AMD could deliver more of those cores and at a price Intel didn't want to match.

If you go back and read the old Zen threads there was a lot of doubt that AMD could even hit the targets they managed to achieve. I think people forget the depths they clawed their way up from.

 

[Saylick]

If you go back and read the old Zen threads there was a lot of doubt that AMD could even hit the targets they managed to achieve. I think people forget the depths they clawed their way up from.

I definitely didn't forget. Their stock price got under $2 per share. It was do or die for them.