AMD took the lid off its Zen CPU today, and the new core is supposedly a doozy. Some of these improvements are features that already leaked, like the core’s use of multi-threading (two threads per core), high-bandwidth, low-latency caches, and a massive improvement to CPU efficiency.

According to Mark Papermaster, Zen will address the Bulldozer family’s greatest flaw: low efficiency. Clock-for-clock, Bulldozer was slower than the Phenom II chips it was meant to replace, and the CPU designer made only modest improvements on this front over the past four years. In some cases, the improved efficiency that chips like Kaveri and Carrizo offered was partially offset by lower frequency targets that kept overall performance largely unchanged.

Zen is supposed to finally change that. The new chip will supposedly improve IPC by a whopping 40% while adopting FinFETs (meaning it’s built on 14/16nm processes). Without clock speed targets, we can’t make an absolute comparison against current AMD chips, but the potential for improvements on this front has always been huge.

AMD also shared some details on K12, its upcoming ARM cores, but it didn’t give much in the way of specifics. We know that K12 is based on ARMv8 (meaning a 64-bit architecture) and that it leverages much of the work done on x86 — though as we’ve already disclosed, Project Skybridge is officially dead. We also know that the CPU has slipped, and won’t debut until 2017. That’s partly due to AMD’s decision to focus on bringing Zen up first, though it’s possible that the yearlong delay of the Cortex-A57 CPU (the Opteron A1100) also played a part.

Assuming AMD can hit reasonable frequency targets, Zen should offer an enormous upgrade over and above what we saw with Excavator — possibly enough to put the company in spitting distance of Intel. We won’t make assumptions on that front until we see final silicon. But even a 25% improvement to general workloads would be a huge improvement to AMD’s competitive position.

Finally, AMD confirmed that its next-generation Radeon architecture will use High Bandwidth Memory, or HBM. Papermaster discussed the evolution of GCN in general terms, implying that its upcoming card generation will be based on a tweaked version of the GCN standard that should deliver a 2x performance/watt improvement. Based on what we’ve heard about Fiji, the next-gen chip is based on the GCN 1.2 “Tonga” GPU, but with a greater number of cores and a huge amount of memory bandwidth. Presumably the power consumption improvements come with further tweaks to AMD’s 28nm GCN design, combined with the power improvements gained from using HBM itself.

Zen is launching in 2017 with K12 following in 2018. Fiji is coming in the near future. More on these products as details become available.