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The Exiled · 22.07.2024., 19:04

Citiraj:

Interview with AMD's Mike Clark the 'Father of Zen' — says 3nm Zen 5 is coming fast

Citiraj:

We interviewed Mike Clark, AMD's Corporate Fellow Silicon Design Engineer, during the company's recent Tech Day, where it unveiled the Zen 5 microarchitecture that powers the company's Ryzen 9000 and Ryzen AI 300 processors. Clark, known as the 'Father of Zen' has worked on AMD's CPU architectures for 31 years. He was the lead architect of the first generation of Zen, which he unveiled at Hot Chips while the company was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy back in 2016.

Over the last seven years, AMD has unveiled five generations of Zen, each delivering double-digit increases in instructions per clock (IPC) improvement. Clark has led Zen's development through all five generations, with a sixth in the hopper, transforming AMD from a struggling chipmaker to a stock market darling that has now clawed back a significant amount of market share from Intel. Now AMD has nearly twice the market cap of its long-time foe Intel, and the architectures driven by Clark served as the fuel for the incredible turnaround.

AMD's Zen 5 architecture will span both the 4nm and 3nm process nodes, powering the next generation of AMD's entire CPU product stack that spans from desktop and mobile PCs to its EPYC processors for the data center. Designing one cohesive underlying architecture to address all those markets is an incredible engineering feat. AMD is launching the 4nm Zen 5 chips at the end of this month, but it hasn't yet announced the timeline for the 3nm variants. Clark expanded on the challenges of designing Zen 5 for both the 4nm and 3nm processes concurrently, saying the two versions are basically arriving "on top of each other."

AMD has used its compact Zen 'c' cores, smaller cores designed for background tasks much like Intel's E-cores, to reduce cost and boost performance in its laptop processors. However, unlike its competitor, AMD hasn't brought those cores to its desktop lineup yet. Zen 5c marks the second iteration of AMD's compact cores, but they are currently not planned for the Ryzen 9000 family. However, Clark said he thinks compact cores will come to future Ryzen desktop chips and also expanded on the techniques the company uses for its unique implementation.

Intel has famously abandoned injecting hardware acceleration support for high-performance AVX-512 instructions, but AMD's Zen 5 marks the debut of full AVX-512 acceleration for the Ryzen family. Unlike Intel, which has to reduce clock speeds when its processors run AVX-512 workloads, AMD says these powerful instructions will run at the same clock speeds as standard integer operations. Clark also expanded on how the company achieved that feat and said that its Zen 5c cores can also run full AVX-512.

Izvor: Tom's Hardware