‘Ryzen’ named as name of AMD’s first Zen processors

The first desktop processors of AMD’s Zen architecture will reportedly be named Ryzen. The processors have eight cores and sixteen threads, a clock speed of 3.4GHz and 20MB L2 and L3 cache.

The information comes from slides leaked from an AMD presentation and posted online by VideoCardz. A clock speed of ‘3.4GHz+’ is announced on the slides. This suggests that this will be the processor’s base clock speed and it will get a higher turbo speed. This information is supplemented on another slide, which uses a technique called Extended Frequency Range. With this technique, the processor can automatically adjust its clock speed to the quality of the connected cooling solution, such as an air cooler, water cooling or even liquid nitrogen.

The slides also provide information about other techniques, called Smart Prefetch, Pure Power and Precision Boost. Smart Prefetch is a technique that predicts what information will be needed in the cache, so that it is there when it is actually needed, resulting in speed gains. Pure Power and Precision Boost work together to increase processor performance while keeping consumption low. For this, the temperature, clock speed and voltage are constantly monitored and based on this, the clock speed is adjusted in steps of 25MHz.

The processors will hit the shelves in the first quarter of 2017. This only concerns the 8-core chips, about which information had already appeared under the code name SR7. Other versions, named SR5 and SR3, will be available later.

AMD has announced that it will hold a live event related to its Zen processors on Tuesday night. The event is aimed at gamers and starts at 10 PM. Presumably the octacore processor from the slides is shown during these presentations.