Thursday, March 2nd 2017
AMD Talks Zen 3, "Raven Ridge," and More at Reddit AMA
AMD, at its post-Ryzen 7 launch Reddit AMA, disclosed some juicy details about its other upcoming socket AM4 chips, beginning with the rest of the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 "Summit Ridge" processor roll-out, and a little bit about its 8th generation socket AM4 APU, codenamed "Raven Ridge." To begin with, AMD CEO Lisa Su stated that "Raven Ridge" will also be sold under the Ryzen brand. This would mark a departure from the less-than-stellar A-series branding for its performance APUs. "Raven Ridge" likely combines a "Zen" quad-core CPU complex (CCX) with an integrated GPU based on one of AMD's newer GPU architectures (either "Polaris" or "Vega").
The range-topping Ryzen 7 series will lead the company's lineup throughout Q1, with six-core and quad-core Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 series launches being scheduled for later this year. Our older reports pinned Ryzen 5 series rollout for Q2, and Ryzen 3 series for the second half of 2017. This is likely also when the company rolls out "Raven Ridge" initially as mobile Ryzen products (BGA packages, which will likely also be used in AIOs), and later as desktop socket AM4 parts.
Looking deeper down into the future, AMD will roll out CPU architectures that incrementally update the "Zen" architecture, much in the same way "Piledriver," "Steamroller," and "Excavator" updated "Bulldozer." For now, Lisa Su is referring to two such future architectures as "Zen2" and "Zen3." These could imply that "Zen2" and "Zen3" will still be heavily based on "Zen," but come with new features and minor performance improvements, don't expect the >50% IPC leap seen between Bulldozer and Zen, but a more reasonable 5-15% gain seen between Bulldozer thru Excavator.
AMD also revealed that Ryzen processors support ECC memory, and briefly touched upon its new Infinity Fabric, a new interconnect technology that succeeds HyperTransport, which handles communication between the two quad-core "Zen" CPU complexes (CCX units) on "Summit Ridge." It also handles inter-component communication on AMD's "Vega" GPUs.
The range-topping Ryzen 7 series will lead the company's lineup throughout Q1, with six-core and quad-core Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 series launches being scheduled for later this year. Our older reports pinned Ryzen 5 series rollout for Q2, and Ryzen 3 series for the second half of 2017. This is likely also when the company rolls out "Raven Ridge" initially as mobile Ryzen products (BGA packages, which will likely also be used in AIOs), and later as desktop socket AM4 parts.
Looking deeper down into the future, AMD will roll out CPU architectures that incrementally update the "Zen" architecture, much in the same way "Piledriver," "Steamroller," and "Excavator" updated "Bulldozer." For now, Lisa Su is referring to two such future architectures as "Zen2" and "Zen3." These could imply that "Zen2" and "Zen3" will still be heavily based on "Zen," but come with new features and minor performance improvements, don't expect the >50% IPC leap seen between Bulldozer and Zen, but a more reasonable 5-15% gain seen between Bulldozer thru Excavator.
AMD also revealed that Ryzen processors support ECC memory, and briefly touched upon its new Infinity Fabric, a new interconnect technology that succeeds HyperTransport, which handles communication between the two quad-core "Zen" CPU complexes (CCX units) on "Summit Ridge." It also handles inter-component communication on AMD's "Vega" GPUs.
18 Comments on AMD Talks Zen 3, "Raven Ridge," and More at Reddit AMA
A 6-core, SMT disabled, high clock, sub 269$ one.
Pretty please
I'd love to see a quad core APU, 4GHz, 2GB of HBM2 memory, Polaris 10. That would be fantastic APU for HTPC's.
Its awesome to see ECC support, however which way I fall on that will likely depend on what happens with the current memory erata, and whether performance scales with memory speed.
Sidenote; considering ECC essentially costs nothing to implement, I'm rather tired of A: Intel segmenting its chips by it, and B: Lack of support from memory manufacturers. ECC doesn't preclude fast speeds.
Bulldozer didn't scale in performance all that good to Piledriver, then to Steamroller, then to Excavator. Seeing how refined ZEN is, I can see approx: 15% to 30% performance improvement, if not more, from ZEN to ZEN 2 & ZEN 3.
Workstation use - perhaps, but i would still be extremely hesitant.
The next big improvement will come at 7nm, but it's not like Intel is racing away either, they'd be around 5% ahead in IPC till the time Zen matures.
And for notebook friendly APUs.