AMD's Zen CPU: 10 key things you need to know

1. It’s all new. Zen is a totally new “clean-sheet” chip design and appears to be 40 percent faster than AMD’s previous CPUs. It features individual cores with SMT, instead of the shared cores with clustered multithreading of today’s AMD CPUs.
2. It’s not a CPU. Technically Summit Ridge isn’t a CPU, but an SoC, which means there’s no chipset needed for most of the functionality. On at least one Summit Ridge demo board, we spied a chip th