ZEN 5 AND 6 LEAKS
Core counts set to double, twice
FIRSTLY,
this is a rumor—one that comes with a set of decidedly official-looking AMD slides apparently snapped from a monitor, and from a reliable source. This isn’t gospel, but it shouldn’t be far from what’s coming either, and is good news. Zen 5 will be a complete architectural overhaul, although the chip structure remains the same. The branch prediction has been redesigned, and gets zero bubble conditional branches (a system that handles a branch without delaying subsequent instructions). There’s more L1 cache, 50 percent bigger at 48KB. The throughput has been worked over, as has the scheduler and prefetch. All this rejigging is said to result in an IPC improvement of 10 to 15 percent.