AMD's Lisa Su Confirms Zen 3 Coming in 2022, Talks Challenges in Notebooks

AMD'due south Lisa Su Confirms Zen 3 Coming in 2020, Talks Challenges in Notebooks

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Zen-2-uarch-Feature

At CES this week, Dr. Lisa Su saturday down for a roundtable discussion with several tech publications. AMD came to CES this week with some major announcements about its Ryzen 4000 Mobile family unit of APUs, and Dr. Su confirmed and commented on several more points during the talk.

Anandtech has a transcript of the discussion, which is worth reading in full, just I want to touch 2 specific issues that Dr. Su discussed. Kickoff, she confirmed that nosotros will encounter Zen three in 2020, though she didn't give a specific appointment or any performance information.

Information technology'south generally expected that Zen iii volition exist the last AM4/DDR4 refresh for AMD and that the company volition motility to new DDR5 platforms in 2021. There have been rumors that AMD targeted IPC for improvements with Zen 3 rather than attempting to lift clock speed and talk of a unified chiplet structure that would combine all eight cores around a centralized 32MB L3 cache, rather than dividing the L3 into 2 16MB chunks. Optimizations like this would supposedly drive a 1.17x IPC improvement over the Ryzen 3000 family based on the Zen 2 architecture. None of these rumors are confirmed, so nosotros'll have to run into what happens on this forepart.

AMD's Mobile Strategy

Mobile has always been AMD'due south weakest market, but the company appears to accept a genuine opportunity with the Ryzen 4000 family unit. Intel's 10th Gen Comet Lake family unit tops out at six cores, while AMD has squeezed 8 into a suite of 15W Ryzen CPUs. At present, granted, we don't know what frequencies these chips will hold nether load, but AMD's base frequency with viii cores is 1.8GHz, 2GHz with the 8C/8T 4700U, and 2.1GHz on the 4600U (6C/12T). The 4500U (6T/6C) has a base clock of 2.3GHz, and the 4300U (4C/4T) rises to 2.7GHz.

AMD'southward Ryzen 4000 15W CPUs.

Intel shows a rather different blueprint. The 6C/12T i7-10100U has a base clock of only 1.1GHz. Dropping to the 105100U (4C/8T) immediately improves the base clock up to ane.8GHz. The Core i3-10110U (2C/4T) has a two.1GHz base clock. We utilise base clock when discussing TDP, in all cases, because Intel derives its TDP figures from base clock. What nosotros come across here is that Intel is cutting base clock much harder than AMD when it adds cores. Moving from 4C/4T to 6C/12T triples Intel's thread count, just cuts its base clock by 1.48x. AMD shifts from 4T – 16T — quadrupling its thread count — and only cuts base of operations clock by about a third. We tin can compare against the electric current Ryzen 3000 Mobile family also, though not perfectly — both the 3700U and the 3500U are 4C/8T parts, and AMD isn't aircraft one of those this time. It's interesting, yet, that the Ryzen 5 4500U maintains the aforementioned 2.3GHz base clock speed as the Ryzen 7 3700U, despite shipping a 6C/6T configuration equally opposed to 4C/8T. All else equal, I'd expect a 6C/6T CPU to draw more power than a 4C/8T chip, then the fact that AMD is holding the same base clock while adding two cores is a positive sign.

This is strictly dorsum of the envelope math, and AMD is admittedly the company making up ground in this comparison. Intel's top-end 10nm CPUs are demonstrably more than efficient in terms of bombardment life than AMD's 12nm equivalents. Since TDP ratings aren't actually measures of power consumption, we can't draw firm conclusions about how the ii companies volition compare, just AMD is ready to make some significant gains hither.

When I covered Intel's press conference at CES, I remarked that AMD and Intel were talking near their next-gen products in very different ways, with Intel talking up avant-garde partnerships in AI and showing off multiple foldable PCs, while AMD focused much more on their own APUs. The difference is more than pare deep. When asked at several points how AMD would respond to specific initiatives Intel has launched in mobile around features like Thunderbolt 3, 1W displays, and Integrated Connectivity (CNVi), Dr. Su gave a broadly similar answer: AMD has been edifice momentum with OEMs since before Ryzen launched, they're seeing increased engagement and sales, and the Ryzen 4000 Mobile family should broaden the entreatment of the company'southward products and allow them to compete in more premium SKUs.

Intel'southward massive market share and frequent use of Marketing Development Funds take given the company far more sway over the laptop designs its customers bring to market than AMD can ever hope to wield. There's a chicken-and-egg problem here, with AMD slowly edifice both mind share and a customer base. Customers have to associate AMD with premium laptops enough for OEMs to want to spend the time and money to create premium experiences around AMD products. Dr. Su reiterates that AMD is going after book areas of the market rather than trying to target smaller niches. I'm interpreting this to mean we'll see AMD trying to build into the true premium marketplace over several years and that information technology'll be a similar process to the manner the visitor has won space in the server market place over the last iii years. A lot will come downward to bombardment life, only the mobile clock speeds AMD has set imply the visitor has done good work on that front.

Now Read: