The new generation of AMD processors will impress with a performance boost

A source interviewed AMD Vice President Forrest Norrod, from which we can now learn something new about the manufacturer’s plans.

The first thing that is of interest is the details about the Zen 3 microarchitecture, which will become the basis for new AMD processors next year.

According to the latest roadmaps, Ryzen 4000 desktop CPUs based on Zen 3 are waiting for us in the third quarter of next year. Also, next year the third-generation Epyc server processors on the same microarchitecture will be released, but it is not yet clear exactly when this will happen.

We know for sure that the new CPUs will remain on the 7 nm manufacturing process, although this will be its improved version. The maximum number of cores will be preserved. Recently, the head of AMD said that next year the company will concentrate on introducing new technologies, and not on the process technology or the number of cores.

And now, Norrod is clarifying that the Zen 3 microarchitecture will bring a significant increase in IPC (the number of instructions per cycle). He did not specify how much the indicator would grow, but added something curious from which conclusions can be drawn.

He said the Zen 2 microarchitecture was more of an evolution of the Zen microarchitecture, but the Zen 3 will be really new. And it will provide a performance boost that “meets your expectations from a completely new microarchitecture.” Given that Zen 2 brought an IPC increase of 15% relative to Zen / Zen +, we can assume that the Zen 3 microarchitecture can boast an even greater performance increase, and this is impressive.

We’ll clarify that the discussion was about Epyc server processors, but it doesn’t matter, since the architecture will remain the same for AMD consumer products.

While Intel promises double-digit IPC growth for future microarchitectures, AMD is confident that it can achieve significant IPC growth in every generation.

Norrod also said that AMD wants to continue to increase the number of cores as it moves to finer manufacturing processes. This will not happen next year, but in 2021, AMD will probably switch to 5 nm standards and again increase the number of cores in its CPUs.