There are times when you get a horrible itch you just can't scratch because you are out in public and the itch is somewhere you'd rather not be seen touching - and then there are times when a new computing product comes to market and you do something crazy like promise people a somewhat comprehensive performance evaluation for their pleasure...

Luckily for you, this is one of those latter times. Sadly, it is also the former, and I am scratching my itch. But you can't see me, can you? can you?

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Within these pages you will find the results of a harrowing journey of many hours of benchmarking and mathematics - all to generate one hypothetical, effectively worthless, instruction processing rate estimate for AMD's upcoming Zen CPU architecture.

Seriously, I don't even have any revenue generation from this, I PAID to do this!

How are we going to estimate Zen's performance, you ask? And what is this about an x4 845 "interrogation?"

Glad you asked! The Athlon™ x4 845 is based off AMD's Excavator architecture, itself an evolution of Steamroller - both descedents of the utter performance failure that was the Bulldozer architecture. AMD has repeatedly stated that their Zen architecture will have 40% higher architecturally-derived IPC - which generally equates to 40% higher performance (but not always). Until now, we've not had a good estimate of Excavator's desktop performance, making AMD's statement somewhat vague, with scattered unaffiliated performance guesstimates for Zen falling anywhere from Nehalem to beyond Skylake - numerous generations of Intel's hardware and a VERY broad range of performance.

My own estimates had put Zen right in the neighborhood of Haswell. Sadly, I do not have any Haswell hardware currently available to me, so I used Sandy Bridge, of which I have two.

Without further ado... (you have to click: Next)