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AMD hints at high-performance Zen x86 architecture
Published on 11th September 2014 by Gareth Halfacree
AMD's Rory Read has admitted that the Bulldozer microarchitecture was a misstep for the company, but promises its next-generation replacement - codenamed Zen - will bring the company back to where it needs to be.
AMD has admitted that its Bulldozer microarchitecture was a misstep but claims that its next-generation replacement, Zen, will deliver the performance improvements required to become competitive with Intel once more.
Speaking at the Deustche Bank 2014 Technology Conference this week, AMD chief executive Rory Read gave a surprisingly honest appraisal of the Bulldozer microarchitecture around which its current-generation processors are designed. 'Everyone knows that Bulldozer was not the game changing part [expected] when it was introduced three years ago,' Read told attendees, according to a partial transcript prepared by WCCFTech. 'We have to live with that for four years.'
When those four years are up, however, AMD promises that it will have something a little special ready. 'For Zen [and] K12 we went out and got Jim Keller, we went out and got Raja Koduri from Apple, Mark Papermaster, Lisa Su,' Read explained, referring to his company's recent hiring spree of big-name industry specialists. 'We are building now our next generation graphics and compute technology that customers are very interested in [...] they’ll move to the next generation node and they’ll be ready to go.'
The speech is the first time AMD has publicly talked about its next-generation x86 microarchitecture, now confirmed as being codenamed Zen. This will launch, it appears, alongside the K12 ARM-based desktop architecture the company has been planning, in order to 'capture [desktop] ARM before it happens.'
Read did not provide any technical details of Zen, or how it differs from the current batch of Bulldozer and derived designs, but he did confirm that the company is targeting the usual manufacturing improvements including FinFET technology and process nodes down to the 14nm and 10nm size. The first FinFET-based product will, Read claimed, launch in 2016, but he did not provide a hint as to the process size.
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2014/09/11/amd-zen/1
AMD’s next-gen CPU leak: 14nm, simultaneous multithreading, and DDR4 support
- By Joel Hruska on January 27, 2015 at 3:27 pm
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Ever since it became clear that AMD’s Carrizo would be a mobile update with a focus on energy efficiency as opposed to raw performance, enthusiasts and investors have been hungry for details about the company’s upcoming CPUs in 2016. AMD has been tight-lipped on these projects, though we heard rumors of a combined x86-ARM initiative that was up and running as of early last year — but now, a handful of early rumors have begun to leak about the eventual capabilities of these new cores.
As with all rumors, take these with a substantial grain of salt — but here’s what Sweclockers.com is reporting to date. We’ll rate the rumors as they’re given on the site: According to the post, the new AMD Zen is:
Built on 14nm: For a chip launching in 2016, this seems highly likely. Jumping straight for 14nm won’t obviate the gap between AMD and Intel, but the company is currently building its FX chips on legacy 32nm SOI while its Kaveri and Carrizo are both 28nm bulk silicon. The double-node jump from 28nm to 14nm should give AMD the same benefits as a single-node process transition used to grant. Given the advantage of FinFET technology, we’d be surprised if the company went with anything else. The chips are also expected to be built at GlobalFoundries, which makes sense given AMD’s historic relationship with that company.
Utilize DDR4: Another highly likely rumor. By 2016, DDR4 should be starting to supplant DDR3 as the mainstream memory of choice for desktop systems. AMD might do a hybrid DDR3/DDR4 solution as it did in the past with the DDR2/DDR3 transition, or it might stick solely with the new interface.
Up to 95W: Moderately likely, moderately interesting. This suggests, if nothing else, that AMD wants to continue to compete in the enthusiast segment and possibly retake ground in the server and enterprise space. Nothing has been said about the graphics architecture baked on to the die, but opting for an up-to 95W TDP suggests that the company is giving itself headroom to fight it out with Intel once again.
Opt for Simultaneous multithreading as opposed to Cluster Multithreading: With Bulldozer, AMD opted for an arrangement called cluster multi-threading, or CMT. This is the strategy used by Bulldozer, in which a unified front end issues instructions to two separate integer pipelines. The idea behind the Bulldozer design was that AMD would gain the benefits of having two full integer pipelines but save die space and power consumption compared to building a conventional multi-core design.
Intel, in contrast, has long used simultaneous multithreading (SMT), which they call Hyper-Threading, in which two instructions from different threads can be executed in the same clock cycle. In theory, AMD’s design could have given it an advantage, since each core contains a full set of execution units as opposed to SMT, where those resources are shared, but in practice Bulldozer’s low efficiency crippled its scaling.
The rumor now is that AMD will include an SMT-style design with Zen. It’s entirely possible that the company will do this — Hyper-Threading is one example of SMT, but it’s not the only implementation — IBM, for example, uses SMT extensively in its POWER architectures. The reason I’m not willing to completely sign off on this rumor is that it’s a rumor that’s dogged AMD literally since Intel introduced Hyper-Threading 15 years ago.
The benefits of using SMT are always dependent on the underlying CPU architecture, but Intel has demonstrated that the technology is often good for a 15-20% performance increase in exchange for a minimal die penalty. If AMD can achieve similar results, the net effect will be quite positive.
The final rumor floating around is that the chip won’t actually make an appearance until the latter half of 2016. That, too, is entirely possible. GlobalFoundries’ decision to shift from its own 14nm-XM process to Samsung’s 14nm designs could have impacted both ramp and available capacity, and AMD has pointedly stated that it will transition to new architectures only when it makes financial sense to do so. The company may have opted for a more leisurely transition to 14nm in 2016, with the new architecture debuting only when GF has worked the kinks out of its roadmap.
We know HBM is coming, but it may not come to desktops or APUs immediately.
No information on performance or other chip capabilities is currently available, and the company has said nothing about the integrated GPU or possible use of technologies like HBM. The back half of 2016 would fit AMD’s timeline for possible APU integration of HBM — which means these new chips could be quite formidable if they fire on all thrusters out of the gate. During its conference call last week, AMD mostly dodged rumors about delays to its ARM products, noting that it had continued sampling them in house and was pleased with the response. Presumably the company’s partners remain under NDA — there are no published independent evaluations of these products to date.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...-simultaneous-multithreading-and-ddr4-support
AMD Zen To Be Featured Inside Summit Ridge Family of 14nm Processors – Rumored To Feature FM3 Socket Support and DDR4 Memory Compatiblity
Hardware 4 days ago by Hassan Mujtaba
The next generation AMD Zen architecture is still undergoing development and will take some time before it’s available to consumers. A report from Sweclockers suggest that the processors which reportedly arrives in Q3 2016 will make home to a new family of high-performance chips known as Summit Ridge. The new processors will be aimed towards both server and consumer markets and will pack true next generation performance over the aging construction cores which started their journey four years ago with Bulldozer.
Image Credits: Sweclockers!
AMD Zen Featured Inside Summit Ridge 14nm Processor Family
The report posted by the source is pretty detailed, unveiling information we have never before heard of. For instance, we are well known to FX and Opteron series however AMD has planned a new name for their next generation AMD Zen based family and they will be called Summit Ridge. Now it’s likely that it might have some relation with the K12 ARM Core family which AMD seems to be launching in 2016 that is based on their own custom design 64-bit design. K12 is the name of the second highest peak situated in the Karakoram range so Summit Ridge as a whole may be a reference to peak in performance and efficiency since this is a completely new architecture.
The upcoming bits get even more interesting with the report alleging that AMD’s next cores are shifting from 32nm straight down to 14nm. The Summit Ridge series will contain up to 8 x86 cores based on the AMD Zen architecture and will be manufactured by either Samsung or Global Foundries. On power side, while AMD’s FX series currently pushes the TDP to 95W on APUs, 125W on FX series and 220W on the 5 GHz series, the Zen based processors will feature a maximum TDP of 95W which is inline with Intel’s 22nm Haswell offerings and also what Broadwell is supposedly going to get when it launches on desktop sometime in mid-2015. There will also be more power efficient variants toning the TDP down to more conservative levels as Zen will be featured across the board and is likely to be as scalable as Broadwell architecture which has seen 4.5W TDP variants in the form of Broadwell-Y.
On the main architectural side of things, AMD Zen cores will take the best from Bulldozer and Jaguar, delivering a SMT (Simultaneous Multithreaded) design that takes advantage of the various resources in the core and dedicate it to an additional execution thread for added throughput. This adds to the area efficiency of the core design and reduces the effect of stalls and pipeline back pressure leading to improved resource utilization inside the core which in turn improves overall performance.
Everyone knows that Bulldozer was not the game changing part when it was introduced three years ago. We have to live with that for four years but Zen, K12 we went out and got Jim Keller we went out and got Raja Koduri from Apple, Mark Papermaster, Lisa sue. We are building now our next generation graphics and compute technology that customers are very interested in and they’ll ( referring to the next generation graphics and compute architecture) move to the next generation node and they’ll be ready to go.
There are also talks regarding the platforms where it’s mentioned that AMD is planning to make a new socket called AMD FM3. There’s no mention what platform is the FM3 socket intended for, some might say that it is the successor to the FM2+ but it might be AMD planning to unify all of their processors on a same socket since that’s what they are going to do Project Sjybridge offering pin-to-pin compatibility for x86 and ARM chips. AMD also adopted a similar design for Carrizo and Carrizo-L which are pin-to-pin compatible. This socket unification project may extend to Zen offering compatibility of high-performance consumer processors and server chips on the same socket. It is said that all Zen based chips will include a northbridge on the same silicon as the CPU and the new southbridge for motherboards will be known as Promontory which is also a reference to land mass like the K12 peak, summit and ridge references in their new naming schemes.
The report alleges that Summit Ridge featuring AMD Zen architecture will make its way only in 2016 since the series was pushed to Q3 of 2016 from an earlier time frame it was previously expected to launch. Regardless of the date, the new AMD Zen based Summit ridge family will enter the market five years after the launch of first generation Bulldozer.
Read more: http://wccftech.com/amd-zen-feature...pport-ddr4-memory-compatiblity/#ixzz3QIu3nvZQ
http://wccftech.com/amd-zen-feature...-fm3-socket-support-ddr4-memory-compatiblity/
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