We’re edging closer to AMD’s Zen launch and the rumour mill is in full swing. A report is circulating the Zen flagship will be an AMD 6850K (quite odd considering Intel has a matching part), packing a whopping 8 physical cores and 16 CPU threads, all for $300.

AMD also has its own version of Intel’s HyperThreading in the works dubbed SMU, with the "same efficiency as Intel's HT". This would be great news as Intel has had AMD beat on this front for some time now.

In terms of performance, the AMD 6850K is unsurprisingly supposed to be a bit of a monster. While AMD is significantly behind schedule and there are some real performance issues that need to be ironed out, the 6850K is already capable of reaching 4.2 GHz boost clock and speeds in excess of 5.0 GHz with liquid nitrogen. That’s up from a 3.8 GHz maximum as recently as August, so things are progressing swiftly on this front.

Single-thread performance of Zen is equal to Haswell-E, and that with multithreading performance the octa-core chip is at the very least equivalent to the Intel Core i7-5960X in terms of performance. That is one heck of a CPU by the way. It might be two years old now but it set back $1000 at the time.

All of this is purely speculation for now, but if true then AMD could have one have one heck of a processor on its hands for a fairly affordable price. Certainly it’s about time Intel had something to worry about.

What do you reckon then, could you be tempted over to the red side if this is true? Or are you waiting to see just how Intel’s Kaby Lake stacks up? Let us know!

Source: Reddit

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