AMD executives talk about Zen 4 and RDNA 3

AnandTech and The Street have published interviews with senior AMD executives that shed light on the company’s plans for the Zen 4 processor core and RDNA 3 graphics architecture.

Starting with Zen 4, AMD plans to move to the AM5 platform, adding support for DDR5 and USB 4.0. Zen 4’s current goal is to strengthen the competitiveness of AMD processors and increase IPC (the number of instructions per clock cycle) through many improvements, similar to how Zen 3 did it with small but important changes in cache structures, branch prediction and conveyors. The state of the x86 architecture leaves little room for radical improvement, but when efforts are made in many places at once, they add up quite well. This is clearly illustrated by the example of Zen 3. Compared to Zen 2, the developers managed to increase the IPC by 19%. In addition, since the new core is being designed for TSMC’s improved 5nm process, it is possible to increase the number of cores within CCX / CCD complexes. Zen 4 is expected to arrive towards the end of 2021.

For RDNA 3, the company plans to offer an architecture that is even more energy efficient than RDNA 2. The high performance per unit of power consumed allows for solutions for “any application” within the same total power consumption.