So if you have been following yesterdays' announcement, you will have noticed that AMD has talked about Zen2 and actually announced a new processor based on it. Last week Intel announced a 48-core processor, AMD figured, hey we're on track so why not announce a 64-core (that's 128 threads) Zen 2 proc.

The processors are of course data-center products, but you know it, this architecture always end up in desktop processors. So basically this could even end up being Threadripper.

A number of announcements have been made, yes Zen2 is based on 7nm, yes AMD has working samples and yes they will arrive in 2019. So far all it pretty interesting. AMD expects a 25% generational performance increase for the CPU cores. While that's not IPC, the theory is that one die package would be 25% faster. How that turns out in clock frequencies we do not know yet as ZEN2 is still in validation. Also, keep in mind that datacenter products are clocked way lower than desktop consumer products of course. It all sounds promising though.

ZEN2 is however not just a die-shink, it's new architecture and the rumor from a while ago was true, it's based on chipsets. 7nm dies surrounding one 14nm IO chip in the center connected through AMD's Infinity fabric. The "Zen 2" high-performance x86 CPU processor core thus has a modular design methodology. An improved AMD Infinity Fabric interconnect links the separated pieces of silicon ("chiplets") within a single processor package. So that is why you see nine dies.

This should solve some latency issues. The new processor also will support 8-channel DDR4 memory. Also, PCI-Express will be supported. Rome looks amazing, the dies are just so small. It was rather hard to find a clear photo, Tom's Hardware was able to take a good shot, so photo credits go to them of course.

AMD Zen 2 "Rome" 64-core processor Photo up close