Thursday, August 8th 2019
AMD Designing Zen 4 for 2021, Zen 3 Completes Design Phase, out in 2020
AMD in its 2nd generation EPYC processor launch event announced that it has completed the design phase of its next-generation "Zen 3" CPU microarchitecture, and is currently working on its successor, the "Zen 4." AMD debuted its "Zen 2" microarchitecture with the client-segment 3rd generation Ryzen desktop processor family, it made its enterprise debut with the 2nd generation EPYC. This is the first x86 CPU microarchitecture designed for the 7 nanometer silicon fabrication process, and is being built on a 7 nm DUV (deep ultraviolet) node at TSMC. It brings about double-digit percentage IPC improvements over "Zen+."
The "Zen 3" microarchitecture is designed for the next big process technology change within 7 nm, EUV (extreme ultraviolet), which allows significant increases in transistor densities, and could facilitate big improvements in energy-efficiency that could be leveraged to increase clock-speeds and performance. It could also feature new ISA instruction-sets. With "Zen 3" passing design phase, AMD will work on prototyping and testing it. The first "Zen 3" products could debut in 2020. "Zen 4" is being designed for a different era.
The "Zen 4" architecture is being designed for a 2021 market debut, and will come out at a time when the 7 nm process will have matured and attained high enough volumes at TSMC for AMD to either build bigger dies (more cores per chiplet), or leverage the even more advanced 6 nm EUV node. The maturity and volumes of these sub-10 nm nodes could change the economics of the MCM approach AMD is undertaking for its EPYC processors.
The "Zen 3" microarchitecture is designed for the next big process technology change within 7 nm, EUV (extreme ultraviolet), which allows significant increases in transistor densities, and could facilitate big improvements in energy-efficiency that could be leveraged to increase clock-speeds and performance. It could also feature new ISA instruction-sets. With "Zen 3" passing design phase, AMD will work on prototyping and testing it. The first "Zen 3" products could debut in 2020. "Zen 4" is being designed for a different era.
85 Comments on AMD Designing Zen 4 for 2021, Zen 3 Completes Design Phase, out in 2020
The only way I can see to reduce power consumption is to increase the number of threads, while keeping the core count the same.
An 8c/32t chip would be the max on desktops, but a 4c/16t would be equivalent to the current 8c/16t in most tasks.
Up to 4 threads, you only need to keep one core awake, which would mean you could clock it higher (better power envelope available compared to 2 core awake).
SMT was introduced at a time when we had single core CPUs and stalled CPUs was a big problem, and the cost of implementing SMT in hardware was minimal. But today, we can almost get as many cores as we want, and as IPC increases, the gains from using SMT decreases. More advanced architectures also increases the cost of implementing SMT, and SMT creates a lot of constraints for development of CPU microarchitectures. On top of this we have all the security implications which has to be dealt with in hardware. SMT also puts extra strain on precious resources like the prefetcher, branch prediction and cache. Any gains seen from increasing SMT to 4 threads will be minimal compared to 1 thread vs. 2 threads, it will be mostly relevant for specific server workloads. At this point it's time to drop SMT for future consumer architectures, and spend the extra die space on increasing IPC further, or adding additional cores instead. If you were given the choice between a 8c/16t CPU vs. 10c, the latter would kick the SMT CPU's behind in desktop tasks.
At a time where future performance scaling is mostly dependent on IPC (since we are at a clock speed wall and can get more cores than we can use), the focus needs to be on pushing more efficient CPU architectures. Even the heaviest threaded desktop workloads will ultimately be limited by performance per core, as synchronization overhead increases with thread count, which means faster cores is essential to continue scaling with more threads.
- server CPUs get the full 4-way SMT
- Threadripper CPUs get 3-way SMT
- desktop CPUs get 2-way SMT
High end desktop CPUs wont have nearly the same performance VS similar core count TR CPUs and the same will be true for TR VS Epyc CPUs.
So meh at 4x SMT... 2c/8t getting spanked by a 4c/4t, in a most everything. Heh
Can't wait to see how well ZEN 3 performs.I have to disagree to a certain extent. Sure AMD is in the market to make profits. Coming out with highly competitive products makes them profits and gives us consumers what we want. But Intel is in the Business for Milking Us, and they've proven this over and over again. For example, Intel caught paying Dell up to a $ Billion Dollars a year not to use AMD chips. We know this as fact, because Intel was forced to pay AMD Billions in damages. Intel does other crap to manipulate decisions by OEM's etc., and the many weird packages they offer Enterprise Clients with huge price premiums for absolutely nothing. Thank goodness AMD is kicking them in the teeth with EPIC.
www.techspot.com/news/81496-intel-10th-gen-18-core-beats-core-i9.html
Yikes!
Damn... Once Intel gets those cobalt connections stable... AMD better hope they get their shit together with the Ryzen 3.
As someone who does tasks that are punished by the 50% cut in RAM write bandwidth on the 3800X and lower...
The biggest take away is that competition is good for all of us. Intel is being pushed to innovate and compete and AMD is finally producing a product I want again. Last time I can honestly say that was with my Athlon XP-M 2500+ Barton... I had a 8320e, that was a good chip and didn't choke horribly on 32GB of DDR3, but it was hard that my C2Q kicked it's ass far too often.
Yum!
I say this as a person who owns an i7-8750H portable... I wanted an Xeon E-2176M based one, but the p630 only does 4K@30hz, the lowly 630 does 4K@60hz... so I'm really excited to see what comes to the mobile space with the true next gen stuff. Assuming they don't continue to cripple the ability to service and upgrade your machine.
As an example, I have an HP Elite x2 1012 G1, it has a micro-sd slot, usb-A ports, multiple m.2 internal slots, the wifi card is upgradeable, passively cooled and the user was allowed to open it, HP bragged about it.
The Elite x2 G3... well those all disapeared, it's actively cooled with fans that the stylus stalls if left on the 'wrong' areas of the screen too long causing it to overheat, the processor is hard throttled to 90% load max, and the user servicable part is the kick stand leg... *cries*
/rant
In the meantime, ZEN2 is doing quite well and climbing.
Personally, I'm more inclined to think future speed gains will come from architecture changes, but even there, we may be in the tweaking territory already. That said, between improved manufacturing and future architecture changes, I fully expect AMD to be able to squeeze another 20% out of Zen. I also expect them to start shifting resources towards mobile and GPU development, now that desktop and server CPU can sand on their own ;)
Coffeelake max (8086K)
Factory 4GHz base with 5GHz Turbo
Coffeelake Refresh max (9900KS)
Factory 4GHz base with 5GHz Turbo
Both max OC with extreme cooling or Delidding can reach max OC barrier of 5.3GHz AVX-2
So Intel 7nm vs Zen4?
As an owner of both the 3900X and 9900K and a very frequent high refresh gamer I can say if I had to get rid of both and build 1 new system I build with the 3900X or 3700X. Really the 9900K gets dragged through the dirt in heavily threaded apps. In games, when running tweaked memory I can close in on and often beat the 9900K. The 3900X and 9900K are so close in high refresh gaming running tweaked RAM that it could easily pass a blind test.
I could never get down with high refresh gaming performance of Zen and Zen+ but Zen2 is it and it’s funny because it’s doing it several hundred MHz under Intel and when I need to get work done the 24 threaded 3900X shames the 9900K.
9900KS is out soon!
It seems people can't face the FACT AMD WON the CPU wars, and Intel is doing anything to distract ZEN, ZEN+ & ZEN2's success, including future ZEN's coming.
Its quite pathetic actually, seeing a company, Intel continue to manipulate and spread BS. Hope AMD keeps piling on pressure, competition and takes as much market share as possible.