AMD is currently working on the next iteration of the Zen micro.
Held on the days of PAX West 2017 one of the “zhelezyachnye” help, hiding under the alias of Joker managed to take exclusive interview from the Manager at AMD marketing, don Woligroski (Don Woligrosky). The conversation was notable for the fact that the representative of AMD is not particularly restrained himself in terms, and revealed some interesting details about the future processor Ryzen. In particular, during the conversation he managed to promise that the future architecture of the Zen 2 will be no less successful than Zen, as with its help, the manufacturer intends to raise the clock frequency of the processors and simultaneously to improve the performance of IPC (the number of executable per clock cycle instructions).
The fact that AMD is currently working on the next iteration of the microarchitecture Zen, surprise is not. The output of the new generation of processors Ryzen logical to expect by the end of next year, when the manufacturing partner AMD, GlobalFoundries will be able to expand the mass production of such processors for 7-nm technology using FinFET-transistors. However, before that, roughly next spring, the market will have to come processors Pinnacle Ridge, based on the second stepping current kernel Zeppelin, which adopted the industry’s terminology can be described as Summit Ridge Refresh. These two events are expected to become major milestones in the further development of processors for Ryzen next year and a half.
Don Waligorski indirectly confirmed the prospects of architecture Zen and assured that the development of successors of the first version of Ryzen in full swing. “We have in stock is one more thing: we cook really good stuff. We’re not one-hit wonders, we will keep up the pressure [for a competitor] to continue. 2018 will be excellent. 2017 was a success, and you will be surprised how things will develop in the future,” he said.
As for more specific applications, the AMD representative confirmed that the microarchitecture Zen 2 will receive a set of improvements aimed primarily at meeting the needs of users desktops. In particular, the processors based on it will increase as power density and clock frequency. On this occasion, the representative of AMD says: “We are definitely working on improvements. Our engineers are really smart guys and it looks like what they design, getting better and better. I can’t talk about specifics, but IPC is one of the areas on which they focused. We also have stock clock rate, and in addition there is a set of tricks that will allow to squeeze out of this frequency the maximum”. Later in the conversation were identified and the specific values of the frequencies of future processors. Thanks to the new architecture and new process technology, they will have to go beyond the 4 GHz boundary.
GlobalFoundries promises that her 7-nm LP process technology (LP = Leading Performance), which AMD is going to use for production cores microarchitecture Zen 2, can provide a 60% energy reduction, 40 percent performance improvement and 50% reduction of the area of the semiconductor cores compared to the modern 14-nm process technology. Probably, many improvements in the Zen 2 will build on this promising semiconductor technology. However, mass production for 7-nm process technology GlobalFoundries will be able to deploy before the second half of next year, so Zen 2 is not too close to term.
However, this does not mean that AMD will not please his fans any interesting novelties. In addition to the revelations concerning Zen 2, don Waligorski also touched upon the promising hybrid processors Raven Ridge. He once again confirmed that they will be released before the end of the year, and first of all AMD is going to release a family of mobile processors Ryzen Mobile. Options for Raven Ridge for desktop systems will be offered somewhat later in the beginning of next year. While AMD believes that such hybrid processors will have to look for professional players since their GPU class Vega will be able to offer sufficient performance for games related to eSports disciplines, and the Zen kernel should not act as a bottleneck from the point of view of computational performance.
© 2017 – 2019, paradox. All rights reserved.
