AMD confirms that Zen 5 is already in development

AMD’s Zen 2 processors already offer impressive performance figures, but that doesn’t mean that the rise of Ryzen has to stop there. AMD plans not only to be competitive but to become performance leaders in the x86 CPU market. With this in mind, AMD needs to think big when it comes to its Zen 2 successors. 

It has already been confirmed that AMD’s Zen 3 core is “design complete”. This means that AMD Zen 3 core architecture has been locked down; and that AMD is now moving into their testing and manufacturing stages for Zen 3. Now, AMD’s core design teams are preparing for both their Zen 4 and Zen 5 architectures. AMD has confirmed both architectures are “in the design phase” during their Horizon Executive Summit in Rome, Italy.  

AMD’s Zen design teams work on a leapfrogging basis. One team works on their next-generation CPU architecture while the other works on next-next-gen hardware. Now that Zen 3’s design is finished, AMD’s engineers have moved to Zen 5, a CPU architecture that’s due to release in 2022. 

One thing to note about AMD’s design teams is that core architecture improvements can be transferred from one architecture to another in some cases. For example, some changes to Zen 2’s branch predictors were due to release with Zen 3. This design feature moved forward into AMD’s Zen 2 core, thanks to the fast work fo AMD’s Zen 3 team. Similar improvements may also have been moved from Zen 4 to Zen 3, highlighting how closely AMD’s design teams can work.  

When speaking at previous EPYC events, AMD stated that they were listening to feedback from their customers and are using that feedback to guide the development of future Zen architectures. This will help make AMD’s Zen cores better suited to a wider range of workloads, and see where customers see the need for increased CPU performance.