Zen will be AMD’s successor to the Bulldoze family of cores. It will be the first ever CPU core from the company to adopt simultaneous multithreading. It’s also the company’s first entirely new CPU core design following the Bulldozer family of cores which debuted in 2011 and was the company’s first ever design to feature clustered multithreading .
In addition to SMT, Zen also features a new high-bandwidth low latency cache system. A vital improvement over the previous generation of cores. Since subpar cache performance was one of the primary pitfalls of AMD’s Bulldozer CPU microarchitecture. The new CPU core is designed for and will be manufactured on an advanced FinFET process. Which would allow the CPU core to scale from low power mobile applications to high performance desktop and enterprise markets.
Zen To Feature A 40% Instructions Per Clock Improvement Over Excavator
Mark Papermaster, AMD’s Chief Technology Officer revealed that the company plans to introduce a huge IPC improvement with Zen over AMD’s latest generation “Excavator” x86 core. A 40% increase in IPC would represent the largest jump in IPC ever for the company, an improvement which Mark Papermaster claimed he had not seen “anywhere in the industry”.
Papermaster also made it a point to highlight that this 40% performance improvement figure is independent from the manufacturing process. So it’s a permanent architectural performance improvement that will always be present regardless of the process node.
Zen will be featured in AMD’s enthusiast CPU product line in 2016. Lisa Su confirmed that the new CPU architecture will be arriving to desktop FX CPUs first and to servers second. Succeeding Zen will be Zen+ cores. Which will feature evolutionary improvement over Zen. The company will introduce a new socket in 2016 dubbed AM4 that will house products spanning from high performance CPUs to mainstream APUs based on Zen and next generation FinFET GCN based GPUs.
The new family of high performance FX CPUs which appeared in previous leaks as “Summit Ridge” will feature SMT CPUs with high core counts and DDR4 memory support. The platform will be based on the new AM4 socket which will be shared with AMD’s upcoming Excavator based 7th generation APUs.
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