“Zen 4”: The AMD 5nm 5.7GHz x86-64 Microprocessor Core
Benjamin Munger, Kathy Wilcox, Jeshuah Sniderman, Chuck Tung, Brett C. Johnson, Russell Schreiber, Carson Henrion, Kevin Gillespie, Tom Burd, Harry D. Fair, David H. Johnson, Jonathan M. White, Scott McLelland, Steven Bakke, Javin Olson, Ryan McCracken, Matthew D. Pickett, Aaron Horiuchi, Hien Nguyen, Tim H Jackson
Abstract
“Zen 4” is AMD's next generation x86-64 microprocessor core, fabricated in a 5nm FinFET process. Close collaboration between the design team and TSMC enabled an optimized process and excellent process scaling relative to the 7nm process used for “Zen 3” [1]. The 55mm2 core complex (CCX), shown in Fig. 2.1.1, contains 6.5B transistors across eight cores, similar to the 8 core CCX in the previous generation. Each core includes a 1MB private L2 cache, double the previous generation, and the eight cores share a 32MB L3 cache. The design also delivers a process-neutral performance increase over “Zen 3”: instructions per cycle (IPC) is increased, the physical design improves process-neutral frequency and changes are made to drive improved power efficiency maximizing both single-threaded performance and performance per watt in multi-threaded workloads. Incremental improvements to the core micro-architecture provide a 13% IPC improvement over the previous generation on an average of single-threaded desktop applications and the “Zen 4” core can operate at up to 5.7GHz delivering a more than 29% increase generationally in single-threaded performance.