AMD’S ANNUAL FINANCE DAY may sound irredeemably dull, but it’s an opportunity to show something interesting, and AMD generally has something to crow about. This year, it was an architectural and process node roadmap, going all the way to Zen 5 in 2024, complete with a ground-up new architecture. However, of more immediate interest is Zen 4. We’re used to AMD’s Zen generations taking decent steps, but the jump from Zen 3 to Zen 4 is shaping up to be a good one.
AMD is expecting an Instructions Per Cycle (IPC) bump of eight to ten percent but has now said it expects an increase of over 15 percent on single-threaded performance, as well as a 25 percent boost in performance per watt. We’ll also see ‘significant’ increases in clock frequencies and there have been demonstrations of Zen 4 chips running at 5.5GHz. Memory bandwidths also get a jolt with up to 25 percent on the bandwidth, thanks to the switch to DDR5, and double the L2 cache per core. Together, AMD is looking at an overall performance increase of 35 percent.