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
Posts: 13235
Joined: 2004-05-16
The original estimate was
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.
Where was the original estimate 8%?
I'm just saying - the article headline is "AMD expects 15%" but then in the actual article, the guy basically says "15% for Zen 2 was basically an outlier because there was left over optimizations - expect a normal jump for Zen 3" which reads to me like less than 15%, not 15%.
Expecting 5% increase from a completely new architecture? These times are finally over I hope
I doubt this is going to be a radical departure from Zen 2. It's not like a Bulldozer -> Zen jump.
Senior Member
Posts: 205
Joined: 2016-03-18
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.
With the adoption rate of new AMD CPUs - they will... sooner than later.
Senior Member
Posts: 158
Joined: 2004-12-24
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.
They didn't, they said Zen2 at 15% was more than typical evolutionary step (due getting things left on cutting board from original Zen plans). They didn't comment how much more performance Zen3 would bring, just that it's what one would expect from completely new architecture, what ever they think that may be.
Senior Member
Posts: 13235
Joined: 2004-05-16
Yeah
I also think this "completely new architecture" thing people keep saying and AMD keeps like throwing around is kind of nonsense. It's not a completely new architecture. Zen 1 wasn't even a completely new architecture - a ton of stuff was pulled in from Bulldozer. I feel like the tech community needs to create some kind of benchmark on how much a design needs to change to be considered a "new architecture".
Senior Member
Posts: 205
Joined: 2016-03-18
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.
Expecting 5% increase from a completely new architecture? These times are finally over I hope