AMD have plans for Zen that spans 5 years

AMD have plans for Zen that spans 5 years

 

AMD’s AM4 platform and their Zen CPUs were first expected to be coming in late 2016, with rumors are suggesting that AMD AM4 motherboards will be coming as soon as March 2016 alongside AMD’s Bristol Ridge Series of APUs. 

When asked about the Zen architecture during the companies 19th Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference the company stated that they have long term plans for the Zen Architecture, with their Zen and Zen+ core designs, with the architecture expected to perform over a refined and upgraded over the next 3-5 years. 

Zen will be AMD’s new core design not just for the desktop market, but for servers, datacenters and even mobile, offering a superior efficiency and IPC (performance per clock) than their current CPU core designs. 

Here is a quote from AMD’s CEO, Lisa Su, when asked about AMD’s Datacenter efforts with ZEN and the architectures long term future.  

 

I think Zen is the first of a multi-year strategy so you know again you ask me what are my thoughts around the company I think AMD at our core we are a high performance computing company and so you know Zen is a from scratch architectural design, for those of us who do those you know it takes a lot of work. It’s a multi-year effort but I think it’s a multi-year effort that we can see coming to fruition. And so what datacenter customers want from us is one we want you to be competitive and two we want a long term roadmap. And so we’ve really talked about Zen+, Zen follow ons, as you know a three to five year view of what’s needed to be successful in the datacenter.

 

  

AMD’s Zen CPU cores are expected to be coming in 2016 on a new 14 or 16nm FinFET process. From the CPU block designs that we have seen (below) AMD will be focusing on Zen’s per core CPU performance, rather than focusing on delivering more, but limited, CPU cores than their previous Bulldozer designs. 

Rather than iterating on the AMD Bulldozer CMT design, AMD has returned to a single fetch, single decode design. This means that AMD is focusing on a single more powerful CPU in it’s CPU block rather than 2 weaker CPU parts that share resources. As we can see below AMD will be widening the Integer Pipeline of Zen by 50% compared to excavator and will be replacing the dual 128-bit Floating point schedulers with dual 256-bit schedulers, which together should allow AMD’s new cores to have dramatically better integer and floating point performance per CPU core, especially as the CPU’s Floating point units no longer feed two CPU cores. 

 

  

So far the AMD Zen CPU cores are looking a lot like the Phenom’s of the past, which fills me with a lot of excitement as I used to own an AMD Phenom II 1090T, one of the best AMD CPUs of recent years, which was sadly replaced by the rather disappointing AMD Bulldozer lineup.

AMD’s Zen CPUs will debut in 2016 with Summit Ridge, which will come with a new socket and with DDR4 support, which should hopefully bring AMD back into the races against Intel who have been rather relaxed when it comes to CPU performance improvement year on year, focusing more on mobile and other low power applications rather than increasing their IPC/ per core preformace.  

 

  

AMD’s Zen CPU designs are set to be a turning point for AMD when they release, with hope being that it will be able to bring AMD back into the CPU market with enough force to turn around their current financial situation. 

 

You can join the discussion on AMD’s Zen CPU architecture and AMD’s future plans on the OC3D Forums.