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.
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So 4000 series. Guess I'll switch from intel 4000

I just want better latency.. guess it will be doable ~50us. And faster clocks. Stable 4.6 -4.7ghz across 8 cores.
I will get 8core 16thread. Dont need more.
The best thing would be, it would be ddr5 compatible, like some intel mobos that worked with ddr3&ddr4.
That said, I can't wait.
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@Hilbert Hagedoorn How did you get from that statement they meant Zen3 would get 15% IPC? They certainly were talking about Zen2 and mentioned Zen3 would have a similar performance uplift but didn't mention IPC. I highly suspect a good deal of performance will be frequency from a much more mature process from TSMC. I expect 5-10% IPC with 10% clock increase in base and boost clocks.
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AMD twisting the knife...
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Anyone who has used Zen/+ and Zen 2 on a regular basis knows exactly why AMD says Zen2 is a new architecture--it behaves fundamentally different--difference between an R5 1600 and a R5 3600X is night and day, and certainly the major differences are not limited to stock clocks. Zen 3 will make some major changes, imo, improvements on Zen 2 IPC of ~15% does not sound far fetched at all, and may turn out to be conservative--the difference in IPC in toto between Zen/+ and Zen 2 was more closely on the order of 30% in many cases, when all factors including cache and clocks are tallied up. I very much like it that AMD is being more conservative in its estimates these days--makes for nice surprises when the products finally ship.
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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".
Zen is a significant departure from the BD/PD arch, its much much closer to the Jaguar APU.