AMD says Ryzen was "a worst case scenario," reveals details on Ryzen 2

AMD was present at this year’s edition of PAX West, and the company’s desktop CPU marketing manager Don Woligroski offered some insight on the upcoming Zen 2 microarchitecture. In a video interview with Joker Productions, Woligroski first defends the arguably low frequencies for the Ryzen CPU clocks, stating that “Ryzen, was the worst case scenario. It was a brand new architecture on a brand new node. So the worst case scenario we could’ve possibly had, and it’s pretty good. You can get (Threadripper CPUs) to over 4 GHz.”

The Zen 2 microarchitecure that will be featured in future Ryzen 2 CPUs will especially improve the IPC (instructions per cycle) rates and the base frequencies. “We’ve got clock speed headroom to take advantage of and we’ve got tweaks to make sure performance for each clock is better,” said Woligrowski. It seems like AMD wants to continue pressuring Intel with the Ryzen 2 family and AMD’s CPU marketing manager assures us that the company has “really good stuff coming.  We’re not a one hit wonder, we’re keeping the pressure on for some time. It’ll be a great 2018. It was a great 2017 and we’ll see how things turn out.”

With the advent of the Ryzen CPUs, AMD is willing to work with game developers and finally move PC gaming into the multi-core era. Woligrowski notes that “if we can push the market, which we have, into giving everybody more cores and threads then all of a sudden people start developing for that[…] it makes a lot of sense to develop for guys who are running 8 threads, 12 threads, maybe we can do something special for them and maybe it changes the way people game in five years.”

When asked how AMD is approaching game optimization for multi-core CPUs, Woligrowski explained that “for games that are already released, our focus is making sure if they have a problem on Ryzen processors[…] we’ll go and engage with the developer. We did it for DOTA 2 and Rise Of The Tomb Raider”. As for what’s coming next year, AMD plans to make specialized engineers available for developers who want to learn how to optimize their code, and game designers will be able to quickly adapt to the evolving APIs.

Meanwhile, Intel certainly isn’t sitting on its hands, since it plans to roll out gen 9 models next year, as well, so we’ll see how well AMD can maintain the pressure in 2018.

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