We all know by this point that AMD has been fighting an uphill battle over the past few years. The company has struggled to stay relevant with consumers as Intel continues to dominate nearly every sector of the market. AMD is barely keeping pace with its rivals massive R&D budget, and it shows in the chips it offers. Very few are a competitive value, and none can challenge Intels quickest.

But, despite seventeen-or-so lackluster sales quarters in a row, AMD may finally be primed to turn their luck around if a leaked slide acquired by Fudzillaisto be believed.

The slide, which is already being called into question by various sources, looks to be legitimate on the surface. It contains details about AMDs long-rumored Zen core APU, as well as the Greenland HBM (high-bandwidth memory) stream processor featuring a massive16GB of memory to spare.Supposedly the chip will be equipped with upwards of 16 Zen x86 cores, each of which couldsupport two threads each.

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Further technicals include 512KB of L2 cache, while each cluster of the Zens four cores will share an 8MB L3 cache. As any math majors out there have probably already figured out, when amped up to the possible 16-cores, this means that thischip could carry 8MB of L2 cache, and 32MB of L3. Thats alotof cache.Ifyoure in theposition like AMDs been in lately, go big or go out of businessare the only options.

The list of exciting possibilities continues withquad-channel DDR4 RAM (up to 3,200MHz), witha whopping 256GB of available memory per channel.

Other features to note arethe APUs 64 lanes of available third generation PCI Express channels, which can switch with SATA on the fly (sharing a max of 16), along with support for the companys crypto co-processor and secure boot feature, made with the enterprise market in mind.

Related:Want an AMD-powered Chromebook? Dont hold your breath!

As far as a release schedule is concerned, rumors suggest AMD willroll out Zensometime in 2016.It should be noted, though, that this information comes only from leaked slides, and even if accurate a release so far away can easily be pushed back due to design issues. Whatever the plan may be, we hope to see this chip sooner rather than later. Perhaps it could give AMD a fighting chance.

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Rumors suggest AMD is eyeing a comeback with its new 16-core chip

For more than a year, information on AMDs next-generation CPU architecture, codenamed Zen, has tantalized the companys fans and those who simply want a more effective competitor against Intel. Now, the first concrete details have begun to appear. And if theyre accurate, the next-generation chip could pack a wallop.

Bear in mind, this is a single leaked slide of the highest-end part. Not only could details change dramatically between now and launch, but the slide itself might not be accurate. Lets take a look:

According to Fudzilla, the new CPU will offer up to 16 Zen cores, with each core supporting up to two threads for a total of 32 threads. Weve heard rumors that this new core uses Simultaneous Multithreading, as opposed to the Clustered Multi-Threading that AMD debuted in the Bulldozer family and has used the last four years.

Each CPU core is backed by 512K of L2 cache, with 32MB of L3 cache across the entire core. Interestingly, the L3 cache is shown as 8MB contiguous blocks rather than a unified design. This suggests that Zen inherits its L3 structure from Bulldozer, which used a similar approach though hopefully the cache has been overhauled for improved performance. The integrated GPU also supposedly offers double-precision floating point at 1/2 single-precision speed.

Supposedly the core supports up to 16GB of attached HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) at 512GB/s, plus a quad DDR4 controller with built-in DDR4-3200 capability, PCIe 3.0, and SATA Express support.

The CPU layout shown above makes a lot of sense. Were clearly looking at a modular part, and AMD has defined one Zen module as consisting of four CPU cores, eight threads, 2MB of L2, and an undoubtedly-optional L3 cache. But its the HBM interface, quad-channel DDR4, and 64 lanes of PCIe 3.0 that raise my eyebrows.

Heres why: Right now, the highest-end servers you can buy from Intel pack just 32 PCI-Express lanes. Quad-channel DDR4 is certainly available, but again, Intels high-end servers support 4x DDR4-2133. Server memory standards typically lag behind desktops by a fair margin. Its not clear when ECC DDR4-3200 will be ready for prime time. Thats before we get to the HBM figures.

Make no mistake, HBM is coming, and integrating it on the desktop and in servers would make a huge difference but 16GB of HBM memory is a lot. Furthermore, building a 512GB/s memory interface into a server processor at the chip level is another eyebrow-arching achievement. For all the potential of HBM and make no mistake, its got a lot of potential thats an extremely ambitious target for a CPU thats supposed to debut in 12 to 18 months, even in the server space.

Nothing in this slide is impossible, and if AMD actually pulled it off while hitting its needed IPC and power consumption targets, it would have an absolutely mammoth core. But the figures on this slide are so ambitious, it looks as though someone took a chart of all the most optimistic predictions thatve been made about the computing market in 2016, slapped them together on one deck, and called it good.

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Leaked details, if true, point to potent AMD Zen CPU