Inside AMD"s Production Of The Zen CPU

Hi-Tech Silvia Meyer
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AMD made radical alterations to its Zen design while keeping itself distant from an ugly past. The company knew it had to make the changes to become a force to reckon with in the server and PC markets. So when the designers of the chip sat down to map the Zen design, they had two priorities: To boost CPU performance to maximum and to stabilize power efficiency.

According to a company spokesperson, the chips will come with 8 to 32 cores. The 32-core chips may come in the quad-CPU configurations although those details haven’t been finalized yet.

AMD promoted the 40% CPU improvement goal for the first time when it introduced Zen back in the year 2015 during a rejuvenation of its chip roadmap. They recently demonstrated that the new chips can prove that it has achieved its goal.

The company also altered the cache structure in the Zen CPU by deciding to widen the size of the L3 cache and shorten the size of the L2 cache to 512KB. The company’s representative who disclosed the news did not reveal the exact size of the L3 cache although he said it will be a lot faster than what came with the previous chips. But despite this development, a drawback about Zen shown during the Hot Chips conference earlier in the week was that the size of the L3 cache was listed as 8MB.

The company also designed the chip’s integer and its floating-point processing units to be more dynamic and accessible via both single and multi-threaded workloads. It will take just a few cycles to load your operations with the processing units.

The previous units were not as dynamic, and were widely considered a problem. Zen comes with a distributed scheduler and also provides visibility to more threads. While Bulldozer on the hand came with a unified scheduler and more complexity.