The AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive on 1800X, 1700X and 1700
by Ian Cutress on March 2, 2017 9:00 AM ESTThe Ryzen Die
Throughout the time leading up to the launch of Ryzen, AMD reaffirmed its commitment to at least +40% IPC improvement over Excavator. This was specifically listed as a goal relating to performance, at an equivalent energy per cycle, resulting in a 40% increase in efficiency. At the Tech Day, AMD listed an overall 2.7x (or 270%) performance per watt improvement, split into the following:
Obviously a number of benefits come from moving the 28nm TSMC process to GloFo’s 14nm FinFET process which is used via a Samsung license. Both the smaller node and FinFET improvements have been well documented so we won’t go over them here, but AMD is stating that Zen is much more than this as a direct improvement to immediate performance, not just efficiency. 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.
The first immediate image out of the presentation is the CPU Complex (a CCX), which shows the Zen core design as a four-CPU cluster with caches. This shows the L2/L3 cache breakdown, and also confirms 2MB of L3 per core with 8 MB of L3 per CCX. 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. AMD is stating that the protocols involved in the L3 cache design allow each core to access the L3 of each other core with an average (but range) of latencies.
Over the next few pages, we’ll go through the slides. They detail more information about the application of Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT), New Instructions, the size of various queues and buffers, the back-end of the design, the front-end of the design, fetch, decode, execute, load/store and retire segments.
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rudolphna - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
Demonizing gamers in your post does nothing to contribute to your credibility, and will only turn off more well reasoned people from listening, or caring, about your opinion.samer1970 - Friday, March 3, 2017 - link
Gamers dont buy 8 cores chips .. If you want good AMD gaming chip at very low price , wait for the 6 and 4 cores Ryzen and then judge ...I expect the 4 cores/8 threads Ryzen at 150$ to blow Intel to pieces ... SOON ..
Imagine a 4.5Ghz AMD Ryzen 4 cores for $150 then talk .
Sttm - Friday, March 3, 2017 - link
4 cores that are noticeably slower than Intel's 4 cores, which sell in a handsome i5 package for $200. I think they need a software miracle and they need it fast to win over the gaming crowd.Cooe - Sunday, February 28, 2021 - link
Bet you're feeling like a massive idiot now if you actually got that 4c/4t Kaby Lake i5 over a 6c/12t Ryzen 5 1600. It was about as fast at 1080p gaming in 2017 as the R5, but nowadays isn't even in the same UNIVERSE as the Ryzen chip. Let alone the performance difference for literally EVERYTHING else.Diji1 - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
Hurr durr you don't like what I like so you're a dumbo making me smarter than you! (yes, I know but they cannot see it themselves because their so smart in their own imagination).JoeyJoJo123 - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
What exactly are you trying to say here?Holliday75 - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
I think it was "Hurr durr".BikeDude - Friday, March 3, 2017 - link
sounded more like 'hold door' to me?star-affinity - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
I didn't know what is considered "wasting your life" is objective – please elaborate. What do you do with your life that makes it better than someone who likes to plays RPGs?Dug - Friday, March 3, 2017 - link
I'm so glad you are the one to judge what people are when they play games. Your insight and thought process is inspiring.I'm only to guess that what you do with a computer is going to change the world.