Monday, November 25th 2019
AMD "Zen 3" Microarchitecture Could Post Significant Performance Gains
At its recent SC19 talk, AMD touched upon its upcoming "Zen 3" CPU microarchitecture. Designed for the 7 nm EUV silicon fabrication process that significantly increases transistor densities, "Zen 3" could post performance gains "right in line with what you would expect from an entirely new architecture," states AMD, referring to the roughly 15 percent IPC gains that were expected of "Zen 2" prior to its launch. "Zen 2" IPC ended up slightly over 15 percent higher than that of the original "Zen" microarchitecture. AMD's SC19 comments need not be a guidance on the IPC itself, but rather performance gains of end-products versus their predecessors.
The 7 nm EUV process, with its 20 percent transistor-density increase could give AMD designers significant headroom to increase clock speeds to meet the company's generational performance improvement targets. Another direction in which "Zen 3" could go is utilizing the additional transistor density to bolster its core components to support demanding instruction-sets such as AVX-512. The company's microarchitecture is also missing something analogous to Intel's DLBoost, an instruction-set that leverages fixed-function hardware to accelerate AI-DNN building and training. Even VIA announced an x86 microarchitecture with AI hardware and AVX-512 support. In either case, the design of "Zen 3" is complete. We'll have to wait until 2020 to find out how fast "Zen 3" is, and the route taken to get there.
Source:
Guru3D
The 7 nm EUV process, with its 20 percent transistor-density increase could give AMD designers significant headroom to increase clock speeds to meet the company's generational performance improvement targets. Another direction in which "Zen 3" could go is utilizing the additional transistor density to bolster its core components to support demanding instruction-sets such as AVX-512. The company's microarchitecture is also missing something analogous to Intel's DLBoost, an instruction-set that leverages fixed-function hardware to accelerate AI-DNN building and training. Even VIA announced an x86 microarchitecture with AI hardware and AVX-512 support. In either case, the design of "Zen 3" is complete. We'll have to wait until 2020 to find out how fast "Zen 3" is, and the route taken to get there.
38 Comments on AMD "Zen 3" Microarchitecture Could Post Significant Performance Gains
It breeds better consumer pricing, for starters.
No denying AMD is very well poised on the CPU front now though...
I'd be surprised if it's anything more than that. Maybe a small 100ish clock boost on top of that 1:1 4%-7%
www.techspot.com/review/1944-intel-core-i7-1065g7/
Chips in laptops are always limited. There's a huge performance variance between different laptops.
You can find the best one, but you have no guarantee that's all the SoC has to give.
One would have to remove all limits from OEM configuration, disassemble the laptop and run it with a desktop cooler.
I'm not even sure if this is possible. :)
OK, maybe they've found a better idea for the architecture and it'll give them extra 5% in benchmarks compared to just optimizing Zen2.
And what about real life? Because after 2.5 years software finally starts to fly on Zen.
Are we looking at another shitstorm of "no one wants to optimize for AMD"? :D
In other words: I don't believe in the new arch. Maybe it'll be tweaked. Maybe they'll make the I/O die on older 7nm (as Zen dies move to EUV).
A lot of things can be improved in Zen2.
And instead of launching a new architecture every 3 years, they could focus a bit on the software. Clearly, they aren't as poor as some people here suggest.
There is still no word on AVX-512 from AMD, unfortunately.It's always hard to know what people mean by such figures. Node improvements doesn't yield IPC improvements.
www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/intel_core_i9_9900ks_processor_review,7.html
They simply test 1 core of each processor, running at the same speed, and see how quickly it gets done.
How does that not indicate IPC ermm levels? vs eachother?
"IPC" is an approximation of the processor's "general performance", which is why you can't just cherry-pick one benchmark and say it demonstrates IPC. You either need a wide selection of benchmarks, or a benchmark which incorporates this into a single one (hopefully without becoming too synthetic).
*) And if we're pedantic here, IPC isn't actually linear either, due to memory latency being a constant. But it's not a problem as long as you compare all CPUs at the same clock.
Of course AMD could make an even more extreme design that no one knows how to use. What's the point?
Intel's products are way more stable, so - even putting aside market share - there's way more value in optimizing software for their APIs.
Keep that in mind next time you'll see a topic about unfair Matlab or something like that. :PCinebench is not a general testing suite (like e.g. SPEC CPU2006).
It's a benchmark for a particular software: Cinema4D rendering engine.
If you run a similar test in different software, you'd get different results.
It has obviously twice the vector width of AVX2, but have also more types of operations and is more flexible.
But new instructions have always the problem of adoption. If you don't ship hardware support, software is not coming along. Right now, support in the client space is pretty much non-existent, but custom softare uses it of course. But once AVX-512 is widespread enough, we'll start to see more applications utilize it, and at that point hardware lacking support will have a major disadvantage. But still, hardware have to come first to lead the way.What "APIs"?
Desktop software is written and compiled towards the x86 ISA, which is microarchitecture agnostic. The only level of "optimization" in that regard is which optional extensions you choose to use, most of which are supported by both. There is no way to "optimize for Intel" etc., not the way most people think it is.
Ryzen is now the best processor because in the real world you get more threads and more cache than Intel, which means that outside of niche use-cases like 720p240Hz gaming and synthetic single-threaded benchmarking, stuff just gets done faster on Ryzen. If Intel had more of an advantage than they do, it wouldn't be so clear cut, but Zen2's IPC and clocks mean that in many cases the fact that each core is still slightly weaker doesn't matter, because AMD will give you TWICE as many threads at Intel at many of the popular price points. That's a 100% absolute advantage when Intel's IPC*Clockspeed advantages are 10% at best, even ignoring the massive power draw issues Intel 14nm++++++++++ has.