AMD's big Zen preview event "New Horizon" was last night and it was chalk-full of extremely impressive performance demonstrations. President and CEO Lisa Su took the stage to wow the audience with one demo after the other, showcasing what Zen is truly capable of in a wide range of applications from gaming to streaming, rendering and video transcoding.

In case you missed it you can find our detailed coverage of RYZENhere, and a recording of the livestream here. In this article we're going to recap key announcements and break-down every one of those 7 benchmarks and demos that were part of yesterday'sshowcase for AMD's next generation RYZEN CPUs.

AMD's Next Generation RYZENCPU Outshines Intel's Best In 7 Different Benchmarks & Demos - TheRecap

Let's start with the basics. AMD made several key announcements yesterday regarding its next generation desktop family of CPUs based on the Zen microarchitecture.

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The new family of desktop Zen CPUs code named "Summit Ridge" will officially debut under the RYZEN brandRYZEN CPUs will officially launch in the first quarter of next year, before April 2017.RYZEN CPUs will be compatible with AMD's next generation AM4 desktop platform.The AM4 paltform featuresDDR4 memory support, PCIE Gen 3, USB 3.1 Gen 2, NVMe and SATA Express.RYZEN CPUs will feature up to8 Zen cores and are capable of executing up to 16 threads simulatneously.All RYZEN CPUs will feature a base clock of 3.4Ghz or higher at launch.

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The 8 core, 16 thread RYZEN CPU has a TDP of 95 watts, 45 watts less than its direct Intel competitor.The 8 core 16 thread RYZEN CPU competes with Intel's fastest 8 core 16 thread offering, the $1199 Broadwell-E. i7 6900K, in terms of features and performance and exceeds it in power efficiency.RYZEN CPUs automatically overclock themselves to deliver the highest possible clock speed attainable under any cooling condition. Including LN2, liquid and air cooling.RYZEN CPUs have hundreds of integrated sensorsthat monitor a plethora of parameters from temperatures to voltages and cachetraffic.RYZEN CPUs have a sophisticated AI framework, making them capable of learning on the fly via a built-in neural net that self-trains and adapts to different applications and sets of code.

The Benchmarks And The Demos

Blender

First up we have Blender, a limitlessly popular CPU renderer. At New Horizon, two identically specced PCs one equipped with an 8 core, 16 thread RYZEN CPU and the other with an 8 core, 16 thread Intel Core i7 6900K CPU were put in a head-to-head comparison. The test itself was simply the task ofrendering an image of the physical RYZEN chip. This workload isvery similar to that of Maxon's popular Cinebench CPU benchmark. The RYZEN CPU was operating at a fixed frequency of 3.4Ghz, with boost disabled. The Core i7 6900K was operating at its default clock speeds, 3.2Ghz base and 3.7Ghz Turbo Boost.

The RYZEN CPU was able to finish the task in 35.57 seconds, while the 6900K was able to do it in 36.01 seconds, roughly half a second more or what's equivalent to 1.3%.For a 95 CPU going up against a 140W chip this is impressive.

Handbrake

HandBrake is an open-source video transcoding tool that enablesusers to convertvideo files from nearly any format to a selection of modern widely supported codecs. It's available for free on Windows, Mac and Ubuntu. You can download it directly from the handbrake website,here.

For this demo again, twoidentically specced machines were used. One with an8 core 16 thread RYZEN CPU running at 3.4Ghz and one with an Intel Core i7 6900K. Both PCswere tasked with transcoding the RYZEN announcement video. This is an extremely CPU intensive workload and all 8 cores and 16 threads of both chips were pegged at100% usage the whole time. The 6900K finished the task in 59 seconds, whilst RYZEN did it in 54 seconds. Five seconds faster, or what's roughly equivalent to 10%.

Battlefield 1 At 4K Ultra Settings

In this demo AMD's James Prior fired up Battlefield 1 running at 4K with all graphics settingscranked up to the max. Here the two identically specced demo systems were equipped with an Nvidia GTX Titan X Pascal each, the fastest gaming graphics card available on the market today. This was meant to be the ultimate gaming showcase to demonstrate that RYZEN can happily keep up with the fastest GPU on the market without any hint of bottlenecking.

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The demo involved a short real-time playthrough of a Battlefield 1 mission. The same 8 core, 16 thread 3.4Ghz RYZEN chip was put in a head-to-head comparison with Intel's i7 6900K. Aframerate counter at the upper right hand corner of the screenreported the average framerate output of both systems in real-time. RYZEN maintained a small performance lead throughout this demo.

Z-Brush & Key Shot - 25Million Polygons Rendered In Real-Time

This is perhaps one of the most impressive demos shown atthe event. Here a designer, Mike, who's specialized in making in-game art assets was brought on to demonstrate what Zen can do forprofessional creators. Some of the games Mike has worked on include Madden, Halo, Call of Duty and DOOM. He has worked on concept 3D designs, development, game environment art and characters. He remarked somewhat humorously thatIf you've got anything that needs to be "modelled or textured, I'm your guy"

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Mike showcased some of the concept 3D art that he's working on which included a 25 million polygon character, rendered in real-time just on the CPU. He then threwa character model along with a 3D rendered RYZEN chip into a scene inside Key Shot. A real-time CPU renderer thatfeatures real-life ray-tracing based lighting, scientific physically basedshaders and High Dynamic Range color. Here RYZEN rendered a scene with 53 million polygons, realistic lighting and scientific based reflections in near real-time withno visible lag and without a hitch.

Gaming And Streaming At The Same Time - RYZEN vsi7 6700KOverclocked To 4.5Ghz

This demo was a perfect example ofhow IPC alone isn't enough and why 8 cores will always trump 4 cores. Here three identicallyspecced PCs were put in a head-to-head comparison playing Dota whilst streaming it live on twitch. One system was equipped with the same 8 core RYZEN chip as before, one with an i7 6900K and the 3rd with an i7 6700K quad core, eight thread CPU overclocked to 4.5Ghz.

The RYZEN and i7 6900K machines passed with flying colors. The gameplay was smooth and the stream had no dropped frames what so ever. The i7 6700K, even at 4.5Ghz, ran the game just fine but struggled to actually stream the gameplay. Nearly every other frame was being dropped. It genuinely looked like a fast-forwarded slide-show.

RYZEN And VEGA In Action - Playing Star Wars : Battlefront In 4K

Finally, we come to our very last performance demo and the only one involving the company's upcoming ultra enthusiast Radeon graphics card featuring the VEGA architecture.

Here a system equipped with RYZEN and a single VEGA graphics card was showcasedrunning Star Wars Battlefront in 4K at 60+ frames per second. This is the very same gaming VEGA Radeon graphics card that was demoed a couple of days outperforming Nvidia's GTX 1080 runningDOOM in4K.

A Defining MomentFor AMD

Zen has been one of AMD’s most eagerlyanticipated productsand arguably its most important onein a decade. Zen breaks new ground for the Sunnyvale California based chip maker in many ways. It’s thecompany’s first ever CPU microarchitecture to feature simultaneous multithreading. It'sbuilt on a process technology that's as close as ever toparity with Intel since the days of the original Athlonin the early 2000s.

This fact alone is enormous. It means that forthe very first timein a decade AMD’s CPUs won’t be at an inherent disadvantage toIntel’s process lead. From an architectural point of view Zen is also quite revolutionary. It incorporates artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques on a chip-levelin a way that's unprecedented in the x86 CPU industry.

Itsbrand new clean-slate core designhas been headed from the get-go by accomplished CPU architect Jim Keller.The very same manwho brought us theoriginal Athlon XP and the very first 64-bit x86 CPU, the Athlon64. Bothwere and remain themost successful and most competitiveCPUs inthe history of the company. It's without a doubt that Zen is AMD’s biggest long-term technology bet and one of the largest engineering efforts undertaken byit to date.

At CES 2016, nearly a year go, President and CEO Lisa Su stood on stage and said she strongly believes that by the same time nextyear at CES 2017 everyone will say "AMD is back!". Well I don't need to wait until January, Icansay it right now without hesitation. AMD really is back folks.

AMD RYZEN Desktop CPU Lineup - Specs & Rumored Prices