Zen: good?
Skylake looks terrible. Barely any IPC increase for desktop users, and no mainstream core increase. Overclocking is better than the messed up Haswell and Broadwell... but even some Sandy Bridge users won't need the upgrade. On mobile battery life and graphics performance is improved somewhat, but GT3 and GT4 parts are hard or impossible to find yet.
AMD has hinted at a 40% instructions per clock increase for Zen. They could actually deliver that since the Bulldozer cores were so bad compared to Intel. They already deliver good price/performance in most segments, especially with low-cost APUs. Maybe Zen will make 2016 the year of AMD.
As if it wasn't already hard enough for AMD, their potential savior/flop may be scheduled for release in Oct. 2016, a full 13 months from now and long after the huge back-to-school season. Zen will be competing against Kaby Lake rather than Skylake, for what that's worth.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
