AMD’s Ryzen 4000 Desktop processors appear to be ready for mass production

Later this year, AMD’s due to release new Ryzen series processors, delivering its customers the company’s new Zen 3 core to enabled enhanced performance levels. 

Now, a report from Igor’s Lab has revealed that AMD’s Zen 3 “Vermeer” processors are already in their B0 stepping, suggesting that AMD’s next generation of Ryzen processors are ready for mass production. Typically, a processor’s B0 stepping is production-ready silicon, featuring fixes which hampered older A-series steppings. It is very unlikely that AMD’s B-stepping for Zen 3 will feature issues which will cause the processors to fail AMD’s validation procedures. 

If AMD’s Ryzen Zen 3 silicon is ready for mass production, this will grant AMD a lot of flexibility when it comes to Zen 3’s launch timing. With Zen 3, AMD can launch without any major stresses. If Igor’s Lab’s findings are correct, AMD won’t be rushing Zen 3 onto the market.  
 

  

Back in 2019, AMD’s Martin Hilgeman, their Senior Manager of HPC applications, revealed slides at the HPC AI Advisory Council’s 2019 UK Conference which shown attendees some early information about the company’s Zen 3 architecture. AMD has since gotten footage from this conference removed from the internet. That said, this information came directly from AMD, and therefore should be considered accurate. 

Based on AMD’s slides, Zen 3 will support the same SP3 motherboard platforms as Zen 2 and ship with the same core/thread counts as today’s Zen 2 series CPUs. AMD’s slides also suggest that Zen 3 may deliver users more L3 cache than Zen 2 and feature a revamped cache structure. This cache redesign is likely to lower cache latencies on Zen 3 processors and help make EPYC/Ryzen more suitable for a broader range of enterprise/desktop workloads.

This alteration could help increase Zen 3’s multi-threaded performance, especially on single die Ryzen series processors. This change could also improve Zen 3’s gaming performance, just like Zen 2’s doubling of L3 cache accomplished over AMD’s older Zen/Zen series chips. 

Based on these slides, Zen 3 will mark another major design change for AMD’s Zen CPU architecture, offering changes what will be hugely beneficial for the processor’s internal cache latencies. While little is known about AMD’s Zen 3 core design, these slides show us that AMD’s next-generation architecture aims to mitigate more of the shortcomings of AMD’s existing designs. These downsides were already largely reduced with Zen 2, but Zen 3 seeks to take things to another level. 

You can join the discussion on AMD’s Ryzen 4000 series processors reportedly being production-ready on the OC3D Forums.