Expectations for AMD’s Zen 4, 5 and 6 were shared by generally knowledgeable YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead. Along with the necessary technical features and performance improvements, he states that market share in server and laptop processors will reach the limit at some point. The Radeon and Instinct products aren’t out there yet, but with the release of rdna 5 they will hit that “wall” too. This is why the brand is looking to launch higher quality products like the Phoenix line, which will be discussed later in this post.
Big leaps with Zen 4
Coming back to the hardware, Zen 4 comes with twice the L2 cache at 1 and 4 MB per core respectively, and the same amount of L3 as Zen 3. A large amount of I/O bandwidth is added in the form of pcie 5.0, ddr5 and additional pcie lanes. AVX-512 performance per thread at the same clock rate is comparable to Ice Lake-X, which has fewer threads and is 50% better than Zen 3.
Single-threaded performance is up 28 to 37 percent over the previous generation, and multi-core performance is at a similar level. This is made possible by an instruction improvement of 15-24% per hour and an 8 to 14 percent higher continuous acceleration clock rate.
Raphael, a series of desktop processors with up to 16 cores, will hit the market in the third or fourth quarter of this year. Dragon Range arrives in Q1 2022 as a laptop release that should beat Intel’s Alder Lake and Raptop Lake-HX. In the premium segment comes Phoenix, a luxury apu with a maximum of 8 cores, which should end in ultrabooks.
Genoa with extra accelerator
Genoa will likely be the first generation based on this new architecture in the last quarter of this year. Server processors take a maximum of 96 cores. Two accelerators are placed on top of the I/O die. The Smart Data Cache Injection Accelerator should help connected (pcie) devices running latency sensitive applications access the cache of the correct core complex as often as possible. Intelligent Data Acceleration Interface Accelerator makes it possible to move data between devices without straining the computing cores.
By mid-2023, Genoa-X with stacked 3D-V-Cache should be on the market, but information about it is still scarce. Also, Storm Peak Threadrippers with 96 cores will arrive in the first or second quarter of 2023. Again, it is unclear whether there will only be Pro versions.
Zen 4c for select customers
Bergamo will release its Zen 4c cores in the first half of next year. These have a halved L3 cache, but other than that they largely correspond to Zen 4. However, AVX-512 performance probably lags behind. This 400W skus is geared towards virtualization and running multiple containers, never using all 16 cores simultaneously in one ccx for extended periods of time and at full load.
256 times Zen5
Zen 5 follows Zen 4 in 11 to 15 months and brings a redesigned architecture that TSMC reportedly could produce on its N3 and N4Ps. Huge increases in clock speed aren’t expected, but in return comes a significant leap forward in IPC and a reworked cache and build layout. Consumer products are expected to have higher thread counts, but not in the form of 16-core chips. Almost all products will be equipped with one or more accelerators.
Epyc Turin server models receive at least 256 of these cores. This series will be released in the last quarter of 2023 and will have a TDP of approximately 600 watts. Various accelerators can be added to the patterns and there is an updated Direct Memory Access engine.
Zen 6 will arrive in 2025 with another new DMA engine, but other than that, few details are known. An important addition could be integrated HBM.
Source: Hardware Info
