APRIL 2020 PCWorld 9WHAT’S NEXT? ZEN 4 AND
5NM PROCESSORS
According to Mark Papermaster, AMD’s chief
technical officer and executive vice president
of technology and engineering, in each of the
product segments AMD serves, there’s a
common thread: incredible amounts of
compute power.
Papermaster noted
that AMD has now
switched to a “chiplet”
architecture, where various
products are developed as
modular parts that can be
fitted together. A modular
approach didn’t just
change the design of
AMD’s products, it
changed the company
culture—it forced various
teams at AMD to
work together,
Papermaster said.
Likewise, it made
validation simpler,
allowing AMD
engineers to
determine whether
chips were viable
in hours, not days.
“This is the new
normal at AMD,”
he said.
As an
example, Papermaster said that AMD devel-
oped a single NUMA domain within its Epyc
chips, organizing 7nm CPU cores and
connecting them with a 12nm Infinity Fabric I/O.
Papermaster said that AMD is planning to
bring “Zen 4” and 5nm processors into the
market by 2022, without specifying whichAMD’s Zen architecture road map now extends through 2022. Remember,
this includes both Epyc products in the datacenter as well as the PC.AMD’s performance took off with its Zen architecture.