AMD Zen 2 Microarchitecture Analysis: Ryzen 3000 and EPYC Rome
by Dr. Ian Cutress on June 10, 2019 7:22 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Ryzen
- EPYC
- Infinity Fabric
- PCIe 4.0
- Zen 2
- Rome
- Ryzen 3000
- Ryzen 3rd Gen
Building a core like Zen 2 requires more than just building a core. The interplay between the core, the SoC design, and then the platform requires different internal teams to come together to create a level of synergy that working separately lacks. What AMD has done with the chiplet design and Zen 2 shows great promise, not only in taking advantage of smaller process nodes, but also driving one path on the future of compute.
When going down a process node, the main advantages are lower power. That can be taken in a few ways: lower power for operation at the same performance, or more power budget to do more. We see this with core designs over time: as more power budget is opened or different units within the core get more efficient, that extra power is used to drive cores wider, hopefully increasing raw instruction rate. It’s not an easy equation to solve, as there are many trade-offs: one such example in the Zen 2 core is the relationship between the reduced L1 I-cache that has allowed AMD to double the micro-op cache, which overall AMD expects to help with performance and power. Going into the minutae of what might be possible, at least at a high level, is like playing with Lego for these engineers.
All that being said, Zen 2 looks a lot like Zen. It is part of the same family, which means it looks very similar. What AMD has done with the platform, enabling PCIe 4.0, and putting the design in place to rid the server processors of the NUMA-like environment is going to help AMD in the long run. The outlook is good for AMD here, depending on how high it can drive the frequency of the server parts, but Zen 2 plus Rome is going to remove a good number of questions that customers on the fence had about Zen.
Overall AMD has quoted a +15% core performance improvement with Zen 2 over Zen+. With the core changes, at a high level, that certainly looks feasible. Users focused on performance will love the new 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X, while the processor seems nice an efficient at 105W, so it will be interesting so see what happens at lower power. We're also anticipating a very strong Rome launch here over the next few months, especially with features like double FP performance and QoS, and the raw multithreading performance of 64 cores is going to be an interesting disruptor to the market, especially if priced effectively. We’ll be getting the hardware on hand here soon to present our findings when the processors are launched on July 7th.
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jamescox - Saturday, June 22, 2019 - link
You seem to just be trying to spread FUD. Also, you don’t seem to know how long a nanosecond is. The CCX to CCX latency can cause slower performance for some badly written or or badly optimized multithreaded code, but it is on such a fine scale that it would just effect the average frame rate. It isn’t going to cause stuttering as you describe.The stuttering you describe could be caused by a huge number of things. It could be the gpu or cpu thermally throttling due to inadequate cooling. If the gpu utilization goes down low, that could be due to the game using more memory than the gpu has available. That will slow to a crawl while assets are loaded across the pci express bus. So, if anyone is actually having this problem, check your temperatures, check your memory usage (both cpu and gpu), then maybe look for driver / OS issues.
playtech1 - Wednesday, June 12, 2019 - link
Good products and good prices.Knock-out blow though? I don't think so for the consumer and gaming space, as I can buy a 9900 today for a fairly small premium over the price of a 3800x and get basically the same performance.
The 12 and 16 core chips look more difficult for Intel to respond to though, given how expensive its HEDT line is (and I say that as an owner of a 7860x).
Atari2600 - Wednesday, June 12, 2019 - link
Yeah, power and thermals are not so important in consumer/game space.In server/HPC, Intel is in deep crap.
Phynaz - Wednesday, June 12, 2019 - link
Bahahaha. No.eva02langley - Thursday, June 13, 2019 - link
Phhh... are you ban from WCCFtech?Gastec - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
I guess I'm neither consumer nor gamer with my i7-860 and GTX 670, G502, G110 and G13. I bought the Logitech G13 just to type better comments on Tweeter :PGastec - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
I also turn OFF RGB whenever I can, anti-cosumerism and anti-social is written on my forehead and everyone is pointing at me on the woke streets.just4U - Thursday, June 13, 2019 - link
I'd say it's a substantial blow to Intel. One of the reasons I picked up a 2700x was the cooler, which is pretty damn good overall.. and the buy in was substantially lower. The 3700x-3800x will only add to that incentive with increased performance (most will likely not even notice..)Drop in the 12-16 core processors (provided there are no tradeoffs for those additional cores..) make the 9900k unappealing on all fronts. The 9700K was a totally unappealing product with it's 8c/8t package..already and after this launch won't make sense at all.
Gastec - Thursday, June 20, 2019 - link
Core i9-9900 I presume. Nowhere to be found for sale in Mordor. Only found one on Amazon.com for $439.99 reduced from $524.95, sold by "Intel" whomever that scammer is.Hamza12786 - Thursday, June 13, 2019 - link
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