AMD Zen “Naples” Monstrous 32 Core CPU Benchmarks & Specs Leaked, Launching Q2 2017

Naples is AMD's next generation Zen based top of the line enterprise chip that the company hopes to take-on Intel with next year, in the highly lucrative server market. It's by far the largest and most powerful CPU system-on-a-chip that the company has ever developed.

AMD Betting Big On High Performance CPUs With An Even Bigger Chip

AMD announced Naples earlier this year with planned market availability by Q2 2017. This data crunching monster is equipped with a small army of next generation high-performance Zen CPU cores. 32 of them to be exact, each capable of executing two threads simultaneously.
The company has been shipping engineering samples of its upcoming enterprise platform built around Naples over the past several months. We got our first sneak peak at it earlier this year when AMD showcased its dual socket 64 core, 128 thread mini super-computer in action.

Naples : Benchmarks & Detailed Specs Leaked

A new set of benchmarks & detailed specs for AMD's upcoming super-chip have just made their way to the Geekbench benchmarking database. This is the second entry that we have found for a Naples engineering sample. The entry, dated September 29, shows that AMD has actually managed to squeeze out even more performance out of the chip. With a multi-core score of 16957, we're looking at a 13% performance improvement over the same chip managed to score just a few weeks ago.

The benchmark was run on a 64-bit Linux kernel, which is commonplace for servers. The nomenclature attached to the engineering sample gives indication that the chip features a base clock speed of 1.4Ghz and a boost clock speed of 2.9Ghz. One particularly interesting part of the spec is the cache. Naples features an astronomically large L3 cache, half a gigabyte large in fact. Which is unprecedented in the industry.

AMD Launching Naples In The Second Quarter Of 2017

Naples is the very first high performance enterprise processor from the company since it introduced the eight core Orochi SOC and the Bulldozer micro-architecture in 2011. So this marks the company's official re-entry into the high performance server arena in more than half a decade. And it's clear the company means business.

It promised to deliver a highly competitive CPU micro architecture to the market and it delivered. A single Zen core delivers double the performance of a Bulldozer core and uses less power. A remarkable feat of engineering talent went into crafting Zen. The company brought back the legendary Jim Keller to head the development of Zen in 2012. It took four years and several billion dollars but the new team managed to successfully hit the performance and power efficiency goals set out for Zen. A point that the company drove home hard recently with an incredibly impressive public performance demo.

However, it takes a lot more than performance to get back in the game. And for AMD this meant having a comprehensive computing platform that's competitive and attractive. So in addition to the new micro-architecture a lot of work went into introducing a brand new comptuing platform to ensure that the entire ecosystem around Zen is competitive. This included DDR4 memory support, new security & encryption IP as well as a brand new CPU interconnect technology that's going to play a pivotal role in supercomputing.

AMD announced that it will talk more about Naples at the upcoming SuperComputing 2016 conference in November. The company will begin shipping the new chip commercially in the server market by Q2 2017.

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