Two years after AMD first unveiled the brand new Zen CPU architecture that would catapult it back into the high-performance PC and server CPU markets, the company has revealed details of the next-generation Zen 2 architecture that will succeed it. With a focus on Epyc chips for servers, AMD now hopes to surpass the performance of its competitor Intel rather than just match it. New processors based on Zen 2 will use a 7nm manufacturing process and start hitting the market in 2019. Although exact dates and product specifications have not yet been revealed, AMD is hoping to achieve “double-digit growth” with this generation of products, according to CEO Lisa Su.
At an event in San Francisco titled Next Horizon, Su and other senior company executives and engineers laid out AMD's[1] plan to make a serious dent in the high-margin server CPU market which is typically slow to adopt new technology. Building on the success of first-gen ‘Naples' Epyc CPUs[2], AMD will introduce the second generation, codenamed ‘Rome', in 2019. The chips will be manufactured by TSMC on its leading 7nm node, which the company says will give it a significant advantage over Intel, which is currently struggling with its own 10nm process[3].
Rome CPUs will have up to 64 cores using a new modular “chiplet” style of architecture rather than the core complexes used by first-gen Zen CPUs[4]. The chiplets will contain nothing but CPU cores, and will be linked via the company's Infinity Fabric interconnect[5] to an on-package 14nm I/O die. AMD says this will greatly help with uniform memory access latency, which was potentially a bottleneck when data had to hop from one core complex to another. Rome...