How Zen Architecture 2 AMD improves performance per watt



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As the launch date of AMD's next Zen 2 architecture is fast approaching, the company has raised the curtain and given us insight into the capabilities and improvements of its new uarch. These new chips include a number of enhancements and benefits to generate both higher cycle instructions (CPIs) and better power consumption.

Let's start with some basics. The Ryzen 3000 family is powered by AMD's Zen 2 architecture. except for its APU. APUs actually have a generation behind them – the 2000 Series APUs were actually built on the first generation of Ryzen, and the APUs of the 3000 series are based on the second generation Ryzen.SEEAMAZON_ET_135 View Amazon AND Trade The architectural improvements and other features we are going to talk about today do not apply to the Ryzen 3 3200G or the Ryzen 3 3400G.

During his Zen 2 presentation, AMD Corporate Fellow Mike Clark said his 7nm transition was in fact more successful than originally planned.

Some of you may remember rumors that AMD would use Ryzen 3000 processors with clocks much higher than the previous ones. According to AMD engineers, the company did not necessarily expect Zen 2 to reach higher frequencies. at all. This is the intrinsic problem of shrinkage of modern UC nodes. Smaller process requirements mean lower voltages, and lower voltages can have negative impacts on the absolute operating frequency. In this case, however, the 7 nm TSMC node and AMD's own engineering were able to create parts that could reach slightly higher frequencies than the 12/14 nm chips.

It should be kept in mind that AMD did not expect improvements in the clock frequency of 7 nm, which should be taken into account when doing the same. Evaluation of the accuracy of rumors about massive clock jumps in the future.

Zen-2-Slide14

An important change coming with Zen 2 has nothing to do with the processor itself. AMD informed us during the event that new scheduler changes were incorporated into the Windows 10 scheduler from Windows 10 1903 (updated May 2019). There are two new features: topology recognition and speeding up the clock. A faster acceleration of the clock reduces the time required for the processor to change state, thereby improving performance and theoretically inactive power consumption by allowing the processor to move more quickly to faster states. Clock lower. Knowledge of the topology should help to keep local CCX data relevant and complete a CCX before loading another one.

These gains – a performance of + 15% in 1080p in Rocket League and a 6% improvement in the launch of PCMark 10 applications – are only result from the update of the Windows 10 scheduler and are separate from any additional gain resulting from improvements to the Zen 2 architecture. Taking advantage of these enhancements requires both an updated chipset driver and the upgrade. day Windows 10 1903.

This slide represents the microarchitectural synthesis of AMD. The chip incorporates a new TAGE branch predictor in addition to the BP perceptron it used in the past. The micro-op cache has been increased to 4K instructions, with double the total of L3 on board. (AMD is now referring to its L2 and L3 combinations as "AMD GameCache.") A new address generation unit (AGU) is now associated with the entire side of the core, with full support for floating point 256 bits via AVX2.

Architectural improvements

The slideshow below presents our in-depth analysis of the specific architectural improvements of the third-generation Ryzen processor. Each slide can be clicked to open it in a new window.

According to AMD, these improvements give them an edge over Intel, both in terms of performance per watt and absolute energy consumption on the wall.

Cinebench is not the ideal solution for measuring energy consumption, but neither is it a bad test. The 3700X – which, in all fairness, is probably closer to the ideal position for architecture – is assumed to be 56% more efficient than the Core i7-9700K, while it only consumes 86 % of the power in absolute value.

Energy efficiency gains over the 2700X are even greater. AMD claims that the 3700X is 1.75 times more efficient in performance / watts than the 2700X, while consuming 70% power.

conclusions

We obviously can not judge a launch as long as we do not have the equipment to test, but AMD offers an aggressive and exciting product family. The TDPs have dropped dramatically. The CPI would have risen 1.15 times. Clock speeds have been increased. Planner improvements and doubled floating point capacity should provide their own robust improvements beyond this figure of 1.15. The width of the Infinity Fabric bus has been doubled to allow PCIe Gen 4 bandwidth to be fully utilized. A new memory divider, DDR4-3733, reduces IF clocks without compromising DRAM scaling.

If you're a fan of AMD APUs, 7 nm also has exciting long-term implications for them. Although we do not know when we will see these parts, the company has clearly aggressively targeted reduced energy consumption as a whole. This will clearly pay off when refreshing the APU family at 7 nm. According to one of our 7nm launch theories, AMD would focus on energy efficiency at least on some parts, and we see it perfectly, with a higher-performance 8-core processor in a 65W TDP and a 16-core processor in a 105W TDP.

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