A number of slides about AMDs upcoming ZEN APU architecture have been shared on AMDs Financial Analyst day. Zen is the code name for a new 14nm x86 micro-architecture being designed by AMD from the ground up and is expected to launch in 2016–2017
ZEN basically will be the equivalent of what phenom is/was back in the days but much more powerful and energy efficient.
Initial findings indicate that that Zen may use a SMT-style micro-architecture, indicating SMT on AMD's cluster core which traditional usage of clustered multi-threading. On the server side of this that means you can combine multiple processors on one PCB. The zen architecture will be built on a 14 nanometer process and feature DDR4 support and 95W TDP, fabrication would happen at GlobalFoundries 14 nanometer FinFET node.
If you look at the slides then you will notice that Zen resembles the 'Stars' core design that AMD launched with its Phenom series, but way more powerful. The module design that you see on the APUs for example are not present here. Each 'clucstre; is its own core, and on an APU each cluster/module has two cores. So each core should be spicy in terms of performance in what seems to be a very parallel approach.
The new processor series will support both DDR3 and DDR4 over the integrated memory controllers as well as PCI-Express 3.0, this will obviously vary per motherboard Each core will get a dedicated 512 KB L2 cache and there is a shared 8MB L3 pool. There are four cores.
A new slide shows more detailed specifications, Zen will definitely get four cores sharing a good 8 MB of L3 cache. So again, the four units are not clusters or modules with two cores per module, this is a pure quad-core unit, and thus the cores share no hardware components with each other, aside from the L3 cache.
With an expected launch time frame of 2016 it will be interesting to see if four cores are enough to tackle Intel, currently their Haswell-E design already is at 8 cores for the consumer market, with each core being twice as fast as AMDs current architecture (per core).
AMD Zen architecture processors are true quad-core CPUs
