AMD: ZEN3 architecture finished – expects 15% faster IPC
AMD’s earlier this week hosted a presentation at the SC19 conference, an International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis. AMD made some interesting remarks about ZEN3 and Epyc in regards to development as well as IPC increases.
First off, AMD mentions the ZEN3 architecture design phase has been finished. Nowadays you can look at AMDs design and release phases as the traditional tick-tock release schedule. Here you may expect an iterated update of ZEN2. That’s said, ZEN3 should be seen as a new architecture is mentioned, which is interesting. We know that ZEN3 is a 7nm+ based product based on the below roadmap slide that was shared a while ago.
Zen1 compared to Zen2 brought a clock-for clock IPC increase of 21%, AMD says it careful, but hints at yet another 15% IPC increase for ZEN3, that’s again clock for clock and not counting faster clock frequencies. The necessity of more cores has not ended, and the future design path will be based on more cores and a greater compute density as well as a focus on memory bandwidth and I/O connectivity.
AMD qualified the remarks by pointing out that Zen 2 delivered a bigger IPC gain than what's normal for an evolutionary upgrade - AMD has said it's about 15% on average - since it implemented some ideas that AMD originally had for Zen but had to leave on the cutting board. However, he also asserted that Zen 3 will deliver performance gains "right in line with what you would expect from an entirely new architecture."
Despite earlier rumors, AMD also confirmed that ZEN3 and Epyc CPUs will not use a maximum of four threads per core, so you can 'bin' that idea. On the Epyc side, there was news as well, Amazon will be deploying Epyc 2 technology for their server farms and thus web services servers, which is huge for AMD of course. 64-core Rome processors will also be used in Microsoft's Azure service.
Senior Member
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ZEN3 will be the Intel "end of line"
Zen2 is already faster with the same clock. Zen3 will get higher clocks, better memory latency and will be more stable (talking about voltage)
In 2 years the CPU marketshare will be 50-50%... now Intel just remains to cry man...
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I don't get where they say they expect a 15% increase?
This line suggests the 15% for Zen 2 was an anomaly - that zen 3 would be what you would normally expect. I normally expect about 5% tbh.
Senior Member
Posts: 5619
Joined: 2008-03-06
Well, good.
But IF only software will be coded so well that it takes fully advantage of there improvements.
Don't throw rocks at me yet!
Let's not forget the Threadripper and Windows scheduler issues!
Hardware is nothing with proper software, and you know that.
Let's hope that new AI and new software compilers will be able to use all the hardware instructions.
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The original estimate was
I don't get where they say they expect a 15% increase?
This line suggests the 15% for Zen 2 was an anomaly - that zen 3 would be what you would normally expect. I normally expect about 5% tbh.
The original estimate was 8% improvement. Now throw in beefier L2 - L3 cache sizes, some "secret" architecture changes, TSMC 7+ node and 15% doesn't sound too far fetched.
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Intel’s only hope is the Cove architecture, especially Golden Cove, but who knows when that will launch.
Zen 3 is gonna be my first AMD purchase.
Is Sunny-Cove even out yet? It's not in desktop AFAIK. That should give a decent lift in IPC, but Zen3 is looking like my next gaming system.