[Manuel Calavera]

Mark Papermaster (AMD’s Chief Technology Officer) however said that the company both “Can’t let up” and “won’t let up” with its pursuit of performance.

“We are always working on the next designs while we are doing our current design,” Papermaster was highlighting the ‘leapfrogging design teams’ approach AMD uses for its engineering efforts. In a nutshell, there is an overall project manager which helps coordinate the efforts of the design teams.

But the teams work on different architectures and are not competing with each other, instead, they share and empowering each other’s ideas. So as Zen 2 is being worked on, they can share what they’re learning (such as the strengths and weaknesses of Zen 2) with the team designing Zen 3, so they can attempt to fix those issues the best they can.

Mark Papermaster also confirmed that Zen 3 is “right on track” for launch next year, and a slide was used to solidify this assertion. Zen 3’s design is complete, and Zen 4 is currently in the design phase. This likely means that Zen 3 is going to start being tapped out, Engineer Sample processors created and then tested in preparation for the architectures release next year.

“We don’t stop there, we already have our engineers working on Zen 4,” he said. It’s fundamental for us to keep momentum in the industry. We have focused on showing the industry we have a roadmap that we can delivery to enterprise and data center as promised.”

“We know that’s a highly competitive environment we are in, but for us, it is personal. We will not let up, you have our commitment,” he concluded.

To put the new roadmap into context, this is the roadmap that AMD put out in the early part of 2018 when the original Ryzen was still current, and we were waiting on the release of the Ryzen 2000 series. Details are scarce for Zen 3, and virtually non-existence for Zen 4. We do know that Zen 3 for the AM4 platform basically represents the end of AMD’s backwards compatibility commitment. So, in theory, at least, Ryzen 4000 should still work on say an X370 motherboard (though we can guess without features such as the latest PCIe standards and so on).

There has been no shortage of other rumors for features such as SMT-4 for Zen 3, though whether this is either accurate or what line of processors would feature SMT-4 is… at best, questionable.

Zen 3 does use 7nm+, which means some of the layers use EUVL in the manufacturing process. In theory, at least, this should improve yields and offer around 15 percent better area scaling, as well as improving power consumption and performance. Performance is said to be about 10 percent better at same power consumption compared to the ‘vanilla’ 7nm process.

Regardless of all that, AMD is executing very well indeed, and with news Google, Dell, HPE and many other partners are jumping into the Rome ecosystem, AMD probably will have a pretty good future in the data center for at least the next few years.