AMD’s Zen 3 CPUs will offer efficiency, but only “modest” speed gains over Zen 2

AMD is currently making big waves with its EPYC 64-core chip, built upon the Zen 2 architecture and featuring, for the first time in the x86 world, the 7nm process node. The move from 14nm to 7nm is promising serious performance uplift, but it already looks like AMD’s following CPU architecture, Zen 3, will be a far more conservative step for the red team. AMD’s CTO, Mark Papermaster, has said in an interview that the 7nm+ process node will be utilised to maximise efficiency within its Zen 3 CPUs, and will offer only “modest device performance opportunities”. While we know relatively little about the Zen 3 architecture, it is the first expected to utilise EUV in some capacity, and AMD is confident that the process is “on track” for launch sometime around 2020. EUV, or extreme ultraviolet lithography, is a transistor fabrication technology that has been on the cusp of widespread adoption for over a decade. EUV hopes to offset IC production’s current unsustainable trajectory, which already utilises heaps of masks, multi-patterning, and optical tricks to create dense silicon circuits.

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