AMD’s Zen 4 architecture reportedly delivers a 29% IPC increase with Genoa

A lot has changed for AMD over the past few years, moving from being the underdog of the CPU market to become the technological leader of the pack with Zen 3. While Intel will regain single-threaded performance leadership is some workloads with Rocket Lake later this year, AMD’s transformation cannot be denied. 

Now, thanks to Chips and Cheese, we have some of our first leaks on AMD’s Zen 4 architecture, which reportedly offers a 29% speed boost with Genoa engineering samples over equivalent Milan processors with the same core counts and clock speeds. That’s a 29% IPC increase for Zen 4, a tremendous generational performance gain for AMD. 

Before Zen 4, AMD is likely to deliver a Zen 3+ architecture, which provides IPC gains that are said to be slightly larger than AMD’s jump from Zen architecture to Zen+. That should mean that we should expect a small IPC increase of 4-7%, as Zen+ delivered a small 3% IPC advantage over Zen. 

Zen 3+ may be AMD’s first AM5 CPU design, which reportedly used a new IO die design and TSMC’s 6nm process node. Zen 3+ could release sometime in 2021, with Zen 4 coming in 2022. Thanks to 6nm, AMD’s Zen 3+ architecture could deliver further clock speed gains for AMD’s Ryzen series processors, finally allowing AMD to reach 5+GHz clock speeds. When combined with a small IPC increase, this change will make Zen 3+ an incredibly capable core design for AMD. 

With AMD’s Genoa EPYC processors delivering a staggering 29% performance increase over Milan without any changes to core count or clock speed, Zen 4 is due to be a powerhouse design for AMD. If AMD can deliver higher clock speeds and higher core counts with Milan, as Milan is due to use a 5nm lithography node, AMD should deliver even larger performance gains. Chips and Cheese estimate a 40% performance gain for Zen 4, adding a clock speed bump of around 10% to their existing 29% IPC increase claims. Add on more cores and Genoa will be a beastly CPU design. 

AMD’s success is hurting them

Can a company be too successful? Ask AMD. AMD is finding it difficult to keep their products on store shelves, which is leaving a lot of their customers dissatisfied. They cannot fulfil more orders, and that is limiting their growth potential for 2021. 

At a time where AMD has a competitive GPU architecture and top-class desktop and mobile processors, they cannot gain market share because that cannot satisfy the market’s demand for new products. Customers have to continue to rely on Intel, as they produce enough CPUs to meet consumer demand. 

AMD cannot produce enough products to satisfy the CPU market, GPU market and console markets at the same time. AMD’s lack of control over manufacturing has limited its growth, and that is a bad thing. AMD needs to be seen as a reliable partner, and they cannot convey that image if it cannot produce enough processors.  

Right now, AMD is reliant on TSMC’s ability to produce 7nm products, and TSMC has sold every 7nm wafer that they can. Perhaps AMD can diversify by using competing nodes for some future products, but that won’t solve AMD’s short term production crisis. 

  

AMD’s Zen 4 architecture should be an exciting one, but PC builders will need to wait until at least 2022 before we can expect to see the architecture hit the market.  AMD’s future looks bright, but only if they can get past their current manufacturing shortfalls. 

You can join the discussion on AMD’s Zen 4 architecture on the OC3D Forums.