In truth, while Zen3 does share similarities to its predecessors, AMD’s architects started off with a clean-sheet design, or as they call it – “a ground-up redesign”. As noted earlier, Mark Papermaster had mentioned that if you were to actually look at the new design from a 100,000-foot level, you’d notice that it does look extremely similar to previous generation Zen microarchitectures. This brings us to today’s Zen3 microarchitecture and the new Ryzen 5000 series. It was a technological gamble that AMD many times has said was made years in advance, and has since paid off plenty. Tying a cutting-edge high-performance 7nm core-complex-die (CCD) with a lower cost 12/14nm I/O die (IOD) in such a heterogenous package allowed AMD to maximise the advantages and minimise the disadvantages of both respective technologies – all whilst AMD’s main competitor, Intel, was, and still is, struggling to bring out 10nm products to the market. This was also the point at which AMD moved to the new chiplet design, leveraging the transition to TSMC’s new 7nm process node to increase the transistor budget for things like doubling the 元 cache size, increasing clock speeds, and vastly reducing the power consumption of the product to enable aggressive ramp in total core counts both in the consumer space ( 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X), as well as in the enterprise space ( 64-core EPYC2 Rome). AMD also stated that it enabled an opportunity to bring some of the future Zen3 specific changes were moved forward into the Zen2 design.

AMD saw Zen2 as a follow-up to what they had learned with the original Zen microarchitecture, fixing and rolling out design goal changes that they had initially intended for the first design, but weren’t able to deploy in time for the planned product launch window. Zen2 was what AMD calls a derivative of the original Zen designs, however it contained historically more changes than what you’d expect from such a design, bringing more IPC increases than what you’d typically see. Features on a 14nm FinFET process node, it was the culmination and the start-off point of a new roadmap of microarchitectures which leads into today’s Zen3 design.įollowing a minor refresh in the form of Zen+, last year’s 2019 Zen2 microarchitecture was deployed into the Ryzen 3000 products, which furthered AMD’s success in the competitive landscape. The original Zen architecture brought a massive 52% IPC uplift thanks to a new clean-sheet microarchitecture which brought at lot of new features to the table for AMD, introducing features such as a µOP cache and SMT for the first time into the company’s designs, as well as introducing the notion of CPU core-complexes with large (8MB at the time) 元 caches. Section by Andrei Frumusanu The New Zen 3 Core: High-LevelĪs we dive into the Zen3 microarchitecture, AMD made a note of their journey of the last couple of years, a success-story that’s been started off in 2017 with the revolutionary Zen architecture that helped bring AMD back to the competitive landscape after several sombre years of ailing products.

Zen time piece