Epyc future ahead, along with Instinct, Ryzen, Radeon and custom chip push
After taking serious CPU market share from Intel over the last few years, AMD has revealed larger ambitions in AI, datacenters and other areas with an expanded roadmap of CPUs, GPUs and other kinds of chips for the near future. These ambitions were laid out at AMD’s Financial Analyst Day 2022 event on Thursday, where it signaled intentions to become a tougher competitor for Intel, Nvidia and other chip companies with a renewed focus on building better and faster chips for servers and other devices, becoming a bigger player in AI, enabling applications with improved software, and making more custom silicon.
„These are where we think we can win in terms of differentiation“, AMD CEO Lisa Su said in opening remarks at the event. „It’s about compute technology leadership. It’s about expanding datacenter leadership. It’s about expanding our AI footprint. It’s expanding our software capability. And then it’s really bringing together a broader custom solutions effort because we think this is a growth area going forward.“
At the event, AMD revealed new roadmaps for its Epyc server chips and Ryzen client chips as well as plans to introduce a new kind of hybrid CPU-GPU chip for datacenters and the aim of integrating AI engines from its Xilinx acquisition into multiple products in the future. Signaling that it has a way to catch up with Nvidia on the AI computing front, the company also announced plans for a unified software interface for programming AI applications on different kinds of chips – somewhat akin to Intel’s OneAPI toolkits. The chip designer is keen on expanding its custom chip business beyond the video game console space into new areas like hyperscale datacenters, automotive and 5G.
„We already have a very broad high-performance portfolio. We already have the leading industry platform for chiplets. But what we’re doing is we’re going to make it much easier to add third-party IP as well as customer IP to that chiplet platform“, Su said. AMD shared more details about what to expect with upcoming chips using its Zen 4 CPU core architecture, which includes the Ryzen 7000 desktop chips and Epyc Genoa server chips coming later this year. It also teased the next-generation Zen 5 architecture that will arrive in 2024 with integrated AI, and machine learning optimizations along with enhanced performance and efficiency. First previewed last fall, AMD claimed Zen 4 will be the first high-performance x86 architecture to use a 5nm manufacturing process and promised an 8–10 percent increase in instructions per clock (IPC) over Zen 3 – the main way chip designers measure performance for new architectures. By comparison Zen 3, which debuted in 2020, provided a larger IPC increase of roughly 19 percent over Zen 2. While the IPC gain may be a little modest, AMD said we should expect a „significant generational performance-per-watt and frequency improvement“ along with a more than 15 percent boost in single-threaded performance and up to 125 percent more memory bandwidth per core. Zen 4 chips will also come with instruction set extensions for AI and AVX-512. To illustrate what those „significant“ improvements will look like, AMD said a Zen 4 desktop CPU with 16 cores – presumably from the Ryzen 7000 lineup – will provide more than a 25 percent boost in performance-per-watt and a greater than 35 percent bump in overall performance over Zen 3. In an updated Zen roadmap, AMD disclosed that Zen 4 will use both 5nm and 4nm process nodes for different products and that there will be a version of Zen 4 that uses its vertical cache technology, which AMD debuted with its Ryzen 7 5800X3D desktop chip and its Epyc Milan-X server chips earlier this year. This is in addition to the Zen 4c architecture AMD is using for its cloud-optimized Epyc Bergamo chips. Starting in 2024, the situation for Zen 5 will be similar. There will be a vertical cache variant along with a Zen 5c variant for cloud-optimized chips. After first teasing the Epyc chips last fall, AMD said it’s on track to launch Genoa, its next generation of general-purpose server CPUs, in the fourth quarter.
