More details on AMD Zen 5 and Zen 6 architecture, 32 cores and direct transition to 2 nm technology
With its Ryzen processors based on the Zen architecture, AMD practices the so-called periodic upgrade practice, alternating major and minor changes. The upcoming Zen 5 cores should bring more significant changes.
The Zen 5 architecture, codenamed Nirvana, is expected to deliver a 10-15% increase in instructions executed per cycle (IPC). Compared to previous generations that brought an acceleration of 19% in the case of Zen 3 and 14% in the case of Zen 4, it doesn't look too much better. However, these are only early assumptions and additional improvements in the future are certainly not excluded. Second, keep in mind the performance-enhancing effect that an increase in operating frequency will bring, which is by no means negligible.
Another important change will happen with the Zen 5 architecture, and that is the application of a hybrid architecture. For the first time when it comes to AMD processors, they will get large and small cores that will be paired on the Zen 5c generation of processors. They should mostly be applied to laptop processor models.
AMD Zen 5 processors will have 32 physical cores
As for the manufacturing and production technology, it will also be improved. Thus, CCD modules containing executive processing cores in their physical form will be compatible with 3 nm production lines, while the IoD system controller will be improved using 4 nm manufacturing technology.
Benchmark.rsWhat is extremely important is the fact that the transition to a more advanced production process will for the first time enable AMD processors with Zen 5 architecture to have a CCD configuration with 16 physical cores, which is twice as many as all previous Ryzen processors, which even in the most powerful configurations had 8 physical cores per one CCD silicon. This concretely means that in the near future we will be using PCs with 32 physical cores as mainstream.
Due to the larger number of physically present cores, the new Ryzen processors will receive changes in the amount of cache memory present. And while the first-level memory for the instruction cache will not change, until then the L1 for data will be increased from 32 KB to 48 KB. Zen 5 cores will still have 1MB of L2 cache available per individual core.
At the same time, information also appeared about the Zen 6 architecture under the code name Morpheus. CCD silicon will be improved by manufacturing in 2 nm technology, while IoD will use 3 nm silicon. A single CCD module will contain as many as 32 Zen 6 class physical processor cores. IPC performance is expected to further increase compared to Zen 5 models by 10% with the addition of specialized hardware to perform FP16 floating point operations to accelerate artificial intelligence and machine learning. The fact that AMD Zen 5 and the newer Zen 6 will almost certainly support the AM5 processor base is also interesting, reports mydrivers.com.