AMD’s first ever Computex Keynote last night was quite a shock. There are so many things to talk about, such as AMD’s decision to start a new architecture, RDNA, for Navi. However, in this article, we will focus on AMD’s Zen 2 CPUs.
For those who haven’t watched this part of the keynote yet, AMD announced 3 CPUs scheduled for a July 7 2019 launch. They include the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X with 8 cores and 16 threads with a base clock of 3.6 GHz and a boost clock of 4.4 GHz, the AMD Ryzen 7 3800X with 8 cores and 16 threads with a base clock of 3.9 GHz and a boost clock of 4.5 GHz, and finally, the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X with 12 cores and 24 threads with a base clock of 3.8 GHz and a boost clock of 4.6 GHz. The former will have a TDP of only 65W and the latter 2 will have a TDP of 105W.
Though these clock speeds do not seem impressive, the real improvement is in the IPC improvement. While only aiming for an 8% IPC improvement, AMD achieved almost double that, at 15%. This means that speeds such as 4.5 GHz on Zen 2 will perform like 5 GHz on Zen. But here’s the thing. The 3900X is not AMD’s best and they are certainly sandbagging.
In CES 2019, CEO Lisa Su gave us a taste of what Zen 2 would look like. This is an 8-core 16-thread CPU that outperformed the Intel Core i9-9900K in Cinebench R15’s multithreading benchmark. Anyways, the black rectangle on the left is the I/O die and the one on the right is an 8-core Client Compute Die (CCD). At the time, some eagle-eyed fans observed there was room for another 8-core CCD as well.
Fast-forward to Computex 2019, last night, and Lisa Su actually personally addressed the media’s concerns over the naked die shot presented months ago. This time, she presented a 12-core CPU with 2 6-core CCDs. What really sparked interest was that these 6-core CCDs were basically 8-core CCDs with 2 cores disabled on each. That’s right, AMD could simply choose to not disable these cores and release a 16-core CPU.
Of course, AMD could have chosen not to release a 16-core Ryzen CPU for many reasons. However, this does not change the fact that AMD is currently capable of releasing a 16-core CPU, which if released, would have absolutely pounded Intel to the ground (and AMD’s Threadripper CPUs as well). The only conclusion I can draw is that AMD is saving their 16-core CPU for Zen 3. We don’t know what improvements it can bring just yet, but we do know for certain there will be a 16-core mainstream Ryzen CPU.
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