It would definitely improve AMD’s AI positioning, whereas with Intel Altera was one slice of a bigger pie,” said Krewell.Section by Andrei Frumusanu The New Zen 3 Core: High-LevelĪs we dive into the Zen3 microarchitecture, AMD made a note of their journey of the last couple of years, a success-story that’s been started off in 2017 with the revolutionary Zen architecture that helped bring AMD back to the competitive landscape after several sombre years of ailing products. “This would give AMD more flexibility, and Xilinx has gone much further down the road on AI. AMD’s AI strategy has been wholly reliant on its Radeon GPUs. Its strategy is built around an API that uses all of these chips for AI processing. 'Altera is still holding the same marketshare.”īut he notes Intel has multiple processor offerings for AI, including Xeon, the Xe GPU, Nervana, and other products.

“Intel was trying to create a one-stop shop for AI accelerators and Altera was part of that solution, but it hasn’t been a big win for Intel,' he said. That hasn’t proved a big boom for Intel, notes Kevin Krewell, principal analyst with Tirias Research. It’s the last major independent FPGA maker after Intel gobbled up its rival Altera in 2015 for $16.7 billion. Xilinx is in San Jose, California, just down the road from AMD in Santa Clara. That’s a hefty sum to pay for a company that might break the $8 billion mark in annual sales this year, but AMD’s comeback has seen a massive run-up in its stock. That’s the biggest purchase this side of Nvidia’s $40 billion buyout of Arm Holdings. Last week the Wall Street Journal reported AMD was in advanced talks to buy FPGA chip maker Xilinx in a deal that could be valued at more than $30 billion. Zen 3 Epyc processors, being developed under the codename “Milan,” are planned for launch later this year, AMD says. Papermaster said the new generation of chips are up to 24% more power efficient than the last generation of Zen, something that will no doubt be appealing to server customers. That will apply to Epyc even though AMD is currently talking games.Īt the same time AMD worked on power efficiency, something that is definitely an issue.

AMD added more branch prediction to reduce delays of computation. Instead of one monolithic CPU, it had several smaller chips with eight or 16 cores per chiplet, all interconnected by a high-speed interconnect.ĪMD CTO Mark Papermaster said Zen 3 increased integer and floating point execution units wider and more flexible, and allows for more execution capability at a lower latency.

Zen 2 introduced some major changes, notably the chiplet design. This announcement was geared around Ryzen and gaming in particular, but there will eventually be new Epyc server processors based on Zen 3. As with previous generations, Zen 3 will be used in AMD’s Ryzen desktop and laptop CPUs and Epyc server processors, just with different core counts and caches. It also has increased maximum boost frequencies, and a redesigned core layout and cache topology. The new Zen 3 architecture is based on a seven-nanometer design and comes with a 19% uplift in instructions per clock (IPC) over the previous-generation Zen 2.