While we have already seen some details regarding AMD's next-generation Zen architecture, a new report suggests that first chips based on Zen architecture will be based on a quad-core design.

According to a slide spotted at Anandtech forums, it appears that first Zen-based chips will stick to quad-core design. As seen earlier, AMD's Zen architecture, unlike muli-core module design used with Bulldozer, uses a monolithic core design and are quite similar to Intel's Haswell architecture, with each core having its own resources and only sharing a last-level cache (L3 cache).

While Intel managed to put as many cores as it wanted on a single chip with Haswell, AMD will apparently limited to a quad-core design, with all four cores sharing 8MB of L3 cache. According to the leaked slide, AMD calls this a "quad-core unit," and while it differs from a module design used with Bulldozer, AMD will have to scale a number of cores, or precisely, number of quad-core units.

So, for example, mid-range APU will pack one quad-core unit while a high-end chip will most likely be based on two such units, packing eight cores and 16MB of L3 cache, 8MB for each of the four cores. Server parts could scale up to four units, packing up to 16 cores and 32MB of L3 cache.

The good thing is that AMD can carve out dual-core parts from a quad-core unit by simply disabling cores. Unfortunately, we still do not know how AMD plans to package these chips and could actually come up with a new high-end desktop processor package, which will lack integrated graphics but feature eight cores, 16MB of cache, dual-channel DDR4 IMC and a 40-lane PCI-Express gen 3.0 root complex. Of course, we will first see FM2+ Zen-based APUs.

There are still plenty of unknowns and biggest one is that AMD depends on GlobalFoundries and its 14nm FinFET manufacturing process.



Source: Techpowerup.com.