Friday, September 29th 2023
AMD Zen 5 Microarchitecture Referenced in Leaked Slides
A couple of slides from AMD's internal presentation were leaked to the web by Moore's Law is Dead, referencing what's allegedly the next-generation "Zen 5" microarchitecture. Internally, the performance variant of the "Zen 5" core is referred to as "Nirvana," and the CCD chiplet (CPU core die) based on "Nirvana" cores, is codenamed "Eldora." These CCDs will make up either the company's Ryzen "Granite Ridge" desktop processors, or EPYC "Turin" server processors. The cores themselves could also be part of the company's next-generation mobile processors, as part of heterogenous CCXs (CPU core complex), next to "Zen 5c" low-power cores.
In broad strokes, AMD describes "Zen 5" as introducing a 10% to 15% IPC increase over the current "Zen 4." The core will feature a larger 48 KB L1D cache, compared to the current 32 KB. As for the core itself, it features an 8-wide dispatch from the micro-op queue, compared to the 6-wide dispatch of "Zen 4." The integer execution stage gets 6 ALUs, compared to the current 4. The floating point unit gets FP-512 capabilities. Perhaps the biggest announcement is that AMD has increased the maximum cores per CCX from 8 to 16. At this point we don't know if it means that "Eldora" CCD will have 16 cores, or whether it means that the cloud-specific CCD with 16 "Zen 5c" cores will have 16 cores within a single CCX, rather than spread across two CCXs with smaller L3 caches. AMD is leveraging the TSMC 4 nm EUV node for "Eldora," the mobile processor based on "Zen 5" could be based on the more advanced TSMC 3 nm EUV node.
The opening slide also provides a fascinating way AMD describes its CPU core architectures. According to this, "Zen 3" and "Zen 5" are new cores, while "Zen 4" and the future "Zen 6" cores are leveraged cores. If you recall, "Zen 3" had provided a massive 19% IPC uplift over "Zen 2," which helped AMD dominate the CPU market. Although with a more conservative 15% IPC gain estimate over "Zen 4," the "Zen 5" core is expected to have as big of an impact on AMD's competitiveness.
Speaking of the "Zen 6" microarchitecture and the "Morpheus" core, AMD is anticipating a 10% IPC increase over "Zen 5," new FP16 capabilities for the core, and a 32-core CCX (maximum core-count). This would see a second round of significant increases in CPU core counts.
Diving deep into the "Zen 5" core, and we see AMD introduce an even more advanced branch prediction unit. If you recall, branch predictor improvements had the largest contribution toward the generational IPC gain of "Zen 4." The new branch predictor comes with zero bubble conditional branches capabilities, accuracy improvements, and a larger BTB (branch target buffer). As we mentioned, the core has a larger 48 KB L1D cache, and an unspecified larger D-TLB. There are throughput improvement across the front-end and load/store stages, with dual basic block fetch units, 8-wide op dispatch/rename; Op Fusion, a 50% increase in ALCs, a deeper execution window, a more capable prefetcher, and updates to the CPU core ISA and security. The dedicated L2 cache per core remains 1 MB in size.
Sources:
cyperalien (Reddit), Moore's Law is Dead (YouTube)
In broad strokes, AMD describes "Zen 5" as introducing a 10% to 15% IPC increase over the current "Zen 4." The core will feature a larger 48 KB L1D cache, compared to the current 32 KB. As for the core itself, it features an 8-wide dispatch from the micro-op queue, compared to the 6-wide dispatch of "Zen 4." The integer execution stage gets 6 ALUs, compared to the current 4. The floating point unit gets FP-512 capabilities. Perhaps the biggest announcement is that AMD has increased the maximum cores per CCX from 8 to 16. At this point we don't know if it means that "Eldora" CCD will have 16 cores, or whether it means that the cloud-specific CCD with 16 "Zen 5c" cores will have 16 cores within a single CCX, rather than spread across two CCXs with smaller L3 caches. AMD is leveraging the TSMC 4 nm EUV node for "Eldora," the mobile processor based on "Zen 5" could be based on the more advanced TSMC 3 nm EUV node.
Speaking of the "Zen 6" microarchitecture and the "Morpheus" core, AMD is anticipating a 10% IPC increase over "Zen 5," new FP16 capabilities for the core, and a 32-core CCX (maximum core-count). This would see a second round of significant increases in CPU core counts.
Diving deep into the "Zen 5" core, and we see AMD introduce an even more advanced branch prediction unit. If you recall, branch predictor improvements had the largest contribution toward the generational IPC gain of "Zen 4." The new branch predictor comes with zero bubble conditional branches capabilities, accuracy improvements, and a larger BTB (branch target buffer). As we mentioned, the core has a larger 48 KB L1D cache, and an unspecified larger D-TLB. There are throughput improvement across the front-end and load/store stages, with dual basic block fetch units, 8-wide op dispatch/rename; Op Fusion, a 50% increase in ALCs, a deeper execution window, a more capable prefetcher, and updates to the CPU core ISA and security. The dedicated L2 cache per core remains 1 MB in size.
111 Comments on AMD Zen 5 Microarchitecture Referenced in Leaked Slides
Which would be quite incredible to any of us who still remember the old Pentium 4 days.
Seriously, it's MLID - not the most credible source of information on the planet. Just look at the slides, 5 nm is stated for 2022, 4 nm for 2023. Do you see that happen? Honestly, I think these are very old slides.
It's ridiculous that people criticizing MLID cant even get their own facts straight. And unlike MLID we all have the benefit of hindsight about how things turned out in the end. Everyone is a big critic behind anonymity but try and put you face and your name out there with your predictions and i doubt that 99% of critics would do a better job predicting things years in advance compared to who they are criticizing.
One thing I have learnt, is performance gains seem to now days get quickly sapped up by less efficient software, devs will just keep stealing those extra cycles.
Friend of mine made 2 versions of an app, one in basic C, the other .NET, the latter uses almost 5x the cycles to do the same thing, but the advantage to him as a developer it was way easier to make the program on the framework.
Gains from cache increases is also going to vary from one software to the next, some software might react well to an increase, others might not be affected at all. Games seem to react particularly well though.
Zen3 is the left-most "Cerberus". Its launch got delayed until end of 2020 simply because of Covid. Then the roll-out stretched all through 2021 and also 2022.
Again, because of Covid, Zen4 didn't get launched until end of 2022. A full 1.5 years late.
Looks like Zen5 will be less than a year late. Covid recovery finally under way.
I'm not happy with anything less than 20%. Not for the money they want, and the investment into the overall platform.