The Zen 3 from AMD will reportedly be more powerful than first believed.
According to the new rumors, as reported on Chiphell, the IPC for the Zen 3 will be increased by 1x percent. It means that the improvement on the third-gen over Zen 2 will reach double-digit levels.
Meanwhile, Zen 3 will also reportedly be running faster than Zen 2. The number being thrown out there was between 100 and 200Mhz. On face value, the rumors have a leg to stand on considering TSMC’s shift from 7nm to 7nm+. For those who don’t know, TSMC is the foundry partner of AMD for the latter’s silicon chips.
However, all these rumors should be taken with a grain of salt. Remember that Zen 2 was also the subject of speculation in terms of the IPC boost. There were entire Reddit threads dedicated to speculating about the IPC numbers. The improvement ranged between 10 and 20%.
While those numbers could not be validated, what’s clear is that Zen 2 was better suited for gaming than Zen. You can attribute that to the latency issue that has hounded the CCX die configuration for the first-gen chip.
So what can gamers expect with the Zen 3? Nothing much, really. You also can’t expect AMD to release a statement of clarification for a technology that is still in development.
Earlier, however, AMD has given a glimpse of its Zen 3 and Zen 4 process during the HPC-AI Advisory Council. The tech company also gave a peek of its roadmap, which outlines the timeline for release.
The whole presentation was uploaded on YouTube, but then quickly taken down. But people have already taken a screenshot of the slides. According to the presentation, the Milan chip–which features the Zen 3 cores–will start production next year. The timeline puts the production phase in the third quarter of 2020.
The same presentation also revealed that Zen 3 would feature 7nm+ technology, which promises higher performance than the 7nm chip. The Zen 3 will also reportedly feature two threads per core. That little bit of detail confirms that AMD is not switching to four threads per core. However, like the Zen 2, it has the same 64 cores on the similar SP3 socket.
For now, all these are just speculation until AMD gives an official statement. The production won’t start until Q3 of 2020, so they will have to wait for a longer time.
