Published in PC Hardware

First Zen Chips will be Quad Core

by on29 April 2015


What is the sound of four cores clapping?

Some of AMD's first Zen based CPUs and APUs will be quad-core.

For those who came in late, Zen is AMD's first major core design after a stint with multi-core modules based around "Bulldozer" architecture. Bu it is starting to look like Zen cores will share no hardware resources with each other, than a last-level cache (L3 cache).

According to Techpowerup Zen scale up will stop at four cores sharing 8 MB of L3 cache and a set of four cores makes up what AMD calls a "quad-core unit." This is not a module, the cores share no hardware components with each other, besides the L3 cache.

If AMD wants to build chips with more than four cores, the company will have to scale up the number of such "quad-core units." A normal APU will have one unit, with four cores, but a high-end desktop chip will likely feature two units, making up eight cores, and 16 MB of total L3 cache, eight MB shared between four cores, each. Opteron chips could have 16 cores, and 32 MB of L3 cache.

So why this design? In theory it means that you can carve out dual-core parts. Clumping four cores is a harvesting technique much like Intel's Haswell.

What will be important is that if AMD getting the energy-efficiency right on Zen and for that it will be hoping that GlobalFoundries to get its 14 nanometer FinFET working.

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