AMD Zen and K12 CPU designs have been taped out

AMD Zen and K12 CPU designs have been taped out

 

According to the LinkedIn Profile of an AMD employee, as spotted by DresdenBoy, the company has already taped out both their x86 Zen CPUs and their ARM based K12 CPUs. Both of these new designs will be based on new FinFET process nodes, though the employee mentions both 16nm and 14nm FinFET, which suggests that AMD will be using both both TSMC’s 16nm and GlobalFoundries 14nm fabrication technologies. 

 

 

  

There is a lot of hype surrounding AMD’s upcoming “Zen” architecture, as it should have a massive leap in performance when compared to it’s predecessor while simultaneously consuming less power and be built using a much smaller and energy efficient FinFET process. 

AMD’s Zen architecture is said to have at least a 40% gain in performance when compared to AMD’s existing Excavator CPU cores, which themselves are two generations above AMD’s existing AM3+/ Piledriver series of Desktop CPUs, which means that on the desktop larger gains are expected. 

The “Zen” architecture is primarily focused on improving AMD’s per-core performance, which will allow AMD to better compete with Intel’s strong per-core performance and allow AMD to compete with Intel in the higher end of the market. 

Recent rumors from AMD claim that at AMD will be doubling both the number of decoder units, ALUs and floating point units in each core of a Zen CPU when compared to AMD Bulldozer based designs, placing them on par with Intel’s current designs in terms of ALU count, AGU count and FMUL count. 

Essentially this means that all the components used in an AMD Excavator, or “Bulldozer” based 2-core module has been placed into one big CPU core, which has then been given the required components to support SMT in order to give the CPU two threads. 

AMD’s Zen CPUs will be arriving on AMD’s upcoming AM4 platform and will support DDR4 memory.

 

  

AMD’s K12 CPU will be releasing in early 2017, aiming to make ARM a more viable server platform. Right now we do not know very much about AMD’s ARM designs apart from the fact that they say that are leveraging their expertise with x86 CPU designs.

 Right now Qualcomm has already unveiled a 24-core ARM based server CPU, so AMD will certainly have some competition when they arrive on the ARM serverspace. These CPUs are also expected to become available to the market around 2017 so it will be very interesting to see how this market develops. 

 

You can join the discussion on AMD’s Zen and K12 CPU core designs on the OC3D Forums.