AMD Zen Microarchiture Part 2: Extracting Instruction-Level Parallelism
by Ian Cutress on August 23, 2016 8:45 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- x86
- Zen
- Microarchitecture
Some Final Thoughts and Comparisons
With the Hot Chips presentation we’ve been given more information on the Zen core microarchitecture than we expected to have at this point in the Zen design/launch cycle. AMD has already stated that general availability for Zen will be in Q1, and Zen might not be the final product launch name/brand when it comes to market. However, there are still plenty of gaps in our knowledge for the hardware, and AMD has promised to reveal this information as we get closer to launch.
We discussed in our earlier piece on the Zen performance metrics given mid-week that it can be hard to interpret any anecdotal benchmark data at this point when there is so much we don’t know (or can’t confirm). With the data in this talk at Hot Chips, we can fill out a lot of information for a direct comparison chart to AMD’s last product and Intel’s current offerings.
| CPU uArch Comparison | ||||
| AMD | Intel | |||
| Zen 8C/16T 2017 |
Bulldozer 4M / 8T 2010 |
Skylake 4C / 8T 2015 |
Broadwell 8C / 16T 2014 |
|
| L1-I Size | 64KB/core | 64KB/module | 32KB/core | 32KB/core |
| L1-I Assoc | 4-way | 2-way | 8-way | 8-way |
| L1-D Size | 32KB/core | 16KB/thread | 32KB/core | 32KB/core |
| L1-D Assoc | 8-way | 4-way | 8-way | 8-way |
| L2 Size | 512KB/core | 1MB/thread | 256KB/core | 256KB/core |
| L2 Assoc | 8-way | 16-way | 4-way | 8-way |
| L3 Size | 2MB/core | 1MB/thread | >2MB/cire | 1.5-3MB/core |
| L3 Assoc | 16-way | 64-way | 16-way | 16/20-way |
| L3 Type | Victim | Victim | Write-back | Write-back |
| L0 ITLB Entry | 8 | - | - | - |
| L0 ITLB Assoc | ? | - | - | - |
| L1 ITLB Entry | 64 | 72 | 128 | 128 |
| L1 ITLB Assoc | ? | Full | 8-way | 4-way |
| L2 ITLB Entry | 512 | 512 | 1536 | 1536 |
| L2 ITLB Assoc | ? | 4-way | 12-way | 4-way |
| L1 DTLB Entry | 64 | 32 | 64 | 64 |
| L1 DTLB Assoc | ? | Full | 4-way | 4-way |
| L2 DTLB Entry | 1536 | 1024 | - | - |
| L2 DTLB Assoc | ? | 8-way | - | - |
| Decode | 4 uops/cycle | 4 Mops/cycle | 5 uops/cycle | 4 uops/cycle |
| uOp Cache Size | ? | - | 1536 | 1536 |
| uOp Cache Assoc | ? | - | 8-way | 8-way |
| uOp Queue Size | ? | - | 128 | 64 |
| Dispatch / cycle | 6 uops/cycle | 4 Mops/cycle | 6 uops/cycle | 4 uops/cycle |
| INT Registers | 168 | 160 | 180 | 168 |
| FP Registers | 160 | 96 | 168 | 168 |
| Retire Queue | 192 | 128 | 224 | 192 |
| Retire Rate | 8/cycle | 4/cycle | 8/cycle | 4/cycle |
| Load Queue | 72 | 40 | 72 | 72 |
| Store Queue | 44 | 24 | 56 | 42 |
| ALU | 4 | 2 | 4 | 4 |
| AGU | 2 | 2 | 2+2 | 2+2 |
| FMAC | 2x128-bit | 2x128-bit 2x MMX 128-bit |
2x256-bit | 2x256-bit |
Bulldozer uses AMD-coined macro-ops, or Mops, which are internal fixed length instructions and can account for 3 smaller ops. These AMD Mops are different to Intel's 'macro-ops', which are variable length and different to Intel's 'micro-ops', which are simpler and fixed-length.
Excavator has a number of improvements over Bulldozer, such as a larger L1-D cache and a 768-entry L1 BTB size, however we were never given a full run-down of the core in a similar fashion and no high-end desktop version of Excavator will be made.
This isn’t an exhaustive list of all features (thanks to CPU World, Real World Tech and WikiChip for filling in some blanks) by any means, and doesn’t paint the whole story. For example, on the power side of the equation, AMD is stating that it has the ability to clock gate parts of the core and CCX that are not required to save power, and the L3 runs on its own clock domain shared across the cores. Or the latency to run certain operations, which is critical for workflow if a MUL operation takes 3, 4 or 5 cycles to complete. We have been told that the FPU load is two cycles quicker, which is something. The latency in the caches is also going to feature heavily in performance, and all we are told at this point is that L2 and L3 are lower latency than previous designs.
A number of these features we’ve already seen on Intel x86 CPUs, such as move elimination to reduce power, or the micro-op cache. The micro-op cache is a piece of the puzzle we want to know more about, especially the rate at which we get cache hits for a given workload. Also, the use of new instructions will adjust a number of workloads that rely on them. Some users will lament the lack of true single-instruction AVX-2 support, however I suspect AMD would argue that the die area cost might be excessive at this time. That’s not to say AMD won’t support it in the future – we were told quite clearly that there were a number of features originally listed internally for Zen which didn’t make it, either due to time constraints or a lack of transistors.
We are told that AMD has a clear internal roadmap for CPU microarchitecture design over the next few generations. As long as we don’t stay for so long on 14nm similar to what we did at 28/32nm, with IO updates over the coming years, a competitive clock-for-clock product (even to Broadwell) with good efficiency will be a welcome return.
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atlantico - Friday, August 26, 2016 - link
Wow looncraz!! Really cool effort you made :)Spunjji - Saturday, August 27, 2016 - link
You numbers are different to everyone else's. Given that you don't cite any of your sources I believe everyone else.Krysto - Wednesday, August 24, 2016 - link
I would hope they try to double the cores of Intel for notebooks.Dual-core Zen without SMT will DESTROY Intel's Atom-based Celerons and Pentiums at the low-end. There will be absolutely ZERO reason to get a Celeron or Pentium notebooks once Zen appears on the market at that price range.
But at the Core i3 and Core i5 levels, I was hoping AMD would price a quad-core Zen with no SMT against dual-core Core i3 and Core i5, and a quad-core Zen with SMT against Intel's quad-core (no HT) Core i5, and finally 8-core with and without SMT variants against Intel's quad-core Core i7 chips (with HT).
If they can basically double the cores compared to what Intel has to offer at around the same price level, and maybe with only slightly worse single-thread performance and slightly worse power consumption, AMD's chips should be a NO-BRAINER. The value would be incredible, and it would push the market towards having powerful quad-core chips by default for most PCs. Intel is going to HATE that, because it would seriously cut into their profits. So AMD could use that strategy to both offer great value products and hurt Intel significantly.
looncraz - Wednesday, August 24, 2016 - link
AMD is not seeking the low end, they are trying to redefine AMD as the top-tier CPU company they once were. They are aiming for the top and the bulk of the market.Zen+'s 15% IPC improvement over Zen might just give them the performance crown, but I'm sure Intel has taken note and planned accordingly.
zaza - Wednesday, August 24, 2016 - link
but the AMD CCX module is a quad core module. i am not sure if it is easy for AMD to just remove two.looncraz - Wednesday, August 24, 2016 - link
Very easy, you just fuse off the defective core, that's the beauty of independent cores. The core complex just shares a common data bus and third level cache. Disabling a core in the complex will simply have it not ask for data on the common data bus. The L3 cache may or may not be cut down (probably will be).H2323 - Wednesday, August 24, 2016 - link
"While Zen is initially a high-performance x86 core at heart, it is designed to scale all the way from notebooks to supercomputers, or from where the Cat cores (such as Jaguar and Puma) were all the way up to the old Opterons and beyond, all with at least +40% IPC."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUSJfGehKDQ
In the video its more than 40% across all of internal texting.
Vigilant007 - Saturday, August 27, 2016 - link
I don't know if AMD will ever have a major win as far as the PC industry again. Realistically they'll end up focusing on building custom x86 for consoles, and server chips. I can also see them exploiting their ability to do x86 to design custom chips for Apple.AMD could end up being a fantastic acquisition target as well.
Tuna-Fish - Tuesday, August 23, 2016 - link
From page 3:> and L2 with 512 entries and support for 4K and 256K pages only.
Surely you meant 4k and 2MB pages only?
deltaFx2 - Tuesday, August 23, 2016 - link
Ian, an error here: "It also states that the L3 is mostly inclusive of the L2 cache, which stems from the L3 cache as a victim cache for L2 data." A victim L3 is by definition an exclusive cache (as you note elsewhere). Also I don't understand why you have the impression that a victim cache is less efficient than an inclusive cache. As you note, an inclusive cache has to keep duplicate copies of data in L2 and L3 whereas an exclusive cache stores exactly 1 copy (either L2 or L3 but never both). In an exclusive cache hierarchy, a cache block is inserted into the L2, and when evicted, is put into the L3. In an inclusive cache hierarchy, a cache block is inserted both into the L2 and L3. Doesn't the exclusive hierarchy make better use of space? Incidentally, AMD has done exclusive caches since K8 at least. This isn't new.