AMD winds up Zen 6 cores for faster clock speeds
During a press event in Las Vegas last week, AMD spilled the beans on its latest Zen cores, which promise an average 27 percent uplift in instructions per clock (IPC) across a variety of AI and server workloads, along with boosted clocks ranging from 4.1 to 5.3 GHz.
Key points
- Many will recall the roughly 5 percent performance gains gaming PC enthusiasts reported with the Ryzen 9000-series, leading to the rather unfortunate turn of phrase "Zen 5 percent." That happened because game engines at the time simply weren't CPU-bottlenecked, and so faster cores could only raise the ceiling so much.
- There are other micro-architectural differences between the two cores designed to balance IPC and clock speeds more effectively.
- After teasing its 256-core Epycs for more than a year, AMD is finally ready to talk about architectural changes to the Zen core that not only make it possible, but will eventually power its next generation of Ryzen processors in desktop and mobile PCs.
This remained a defining characteristic and advantage of AMD’s compact core architecture through Zen 5, which allowed it to ship Turin parts with up to 192 cores without users having to worry about whether their app was running on a compact core or not.
Additional details
- We'd be tempted to call the core iterative if it weren't for the 20 to 31 percent IPC uplift for cloud and AI workloads that AMD claims over Zen 5.
- Even so, AMD fellow and "Zen daddy" Mike Clark tells El Reg that PC buyers expect more than a 6 percent gain from Zen 6.
- Meanwhile, from what we understand, Zen 6's shallower queue enables it to clock higher on less power.
- Both Zen 6 and Zen 6c share the same ISA, with clock being the main differentiator.
- That's a pretty sizable jump, but just because AMD is seeing generational performance uplift in enterprise server and cloud workloads doesn't mean we'll see the same gains on the client side.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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