Recently at the ISCC, International Solid-State Circuits Conference, it was revealed that the upcoming AMD Zen cores are more compact than Intel's current 14nm x86 core technology. Intel engineers and analysts agreed that the Zen core is clearly competitive, but there are other variables to account for. AMD's decision to use a metal-insulator-metal capacitor has led to a 15% reduction in switching capacitance. This gives Zen an edge with lower operating voltages, greater per-core voltage, and frequency control. Also of note is that there are two eight-core designs running at 3.4GHz with simultaneous multithreading enabled.