Another Snowy Owl batch [surely that should be a parliament of owls.ed] will have 8, 12 and 16 cores in a SP4 BGA package that is pin compatible with SP4R2. We have no idea why AMD calls these sockets by different names, but apparently they will fit different motherboards too. The 8, 12 and 16 core Snowy Owl are targeting the rats and mice in the mid-level market.

The performance market is, as we exclusively unveiled, going to be served by the  Naples SP3 processor. There will be three different configurations with 16, 24 or 32-Cores. SP3 is a new socket and this one is exclusively reserved for Naples processors.

We have already mentioned the Zeppelin ZP cluster that has eight Zen cores each having 512 KB L2 cache and  four Zen cores share 8 MB or L3 cache. Since the four Zen cores share the same cache, adding three clusters like this results in a 12 core version. Getting two Zeppelin clusters together would create a Naples 16-core, three Zeppelin clusters are Naples 24-core while four Zeppelin clusters would create 32-core Zeppelin with 64 thread support.

However, a few questions remain.  The Instruction per Clock is still top secret. Many insiders are telling us that the Zen will  be competitive with Skylake architecture but no one is really sure how good Zen will be against Intel.