AMD To Provide Architectural Deep-Dive Into 3rd Gen Ryzen CPUs With Zen 2 Cores and Navi GPUs at Hot Chips 2019

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AMD has announced that its CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, will be delivering a keynote at this year’s Hot Chips symposium which would include a session on their next-generation CPU and GPU cores. AMD’s announcement comes just weeks ahead of their Computex 2019 keynote where AMD will also introduce to public their 3rd Gen Ryzen CPUs and new Radeon GPUs.

AMD at Hot Chips 2019: Architectural Deep Dive into Zen 2 (3rd Gen Ryzen) CPU Core and Navi (Radeon) GPU Core
The Hot Chips Symposium on High-Performance chips will commence on 18th August with AMD planning to hold their own conference during the event on 19th August at Palo Alto at 1:45 PM PT. During the conference, AMD is expected to talk about two key architectures that are powering their next-generation CPU and GPU lineups, Zen 2 and Navi.

• In her keynote, ‘Delivering the Future of High-Performance Computing with System, Software and Silicon Co-Optimization’, Su will highlight the opportunities for future generations of computing and graphics products to deliver more performance with greater efficiency. via AMD

Additionally, AMD will host Hot Chips sessions on the next generation “Zen 2” x86 CPU core and “Navi” GPU featuring 7nm process technology:

• “Zen 2”: On Monday, Aug. 19 at 9:00 AM PT, AMD will provide a deep dive into the next generation 7nm “Zen 2” core architecture to be deployed in 3rd Generation Ryzen desktop processors and 2ndGeneration EPYC servers.
• “Navi”: On Tuesday, Aug. 20 at 6:15 PM PT, AMD will provide a “Navi” GPU architecture and 7nm technology implementation presentation.

In addition to AMD’s chips, there will be several other keynotes from other industry leaders such as Intel, NVIDIA, IBM, etc. All tech giants will be talking about their latest high-performance chips. What is interesting about the dates is that the products that are usually discussed during Hot Chips are generally launched and available in the market hence companies can provide a deeper look at the architecture itself. Since the event takes place in August, it is likely that AMD would have the products on shelves before that either in July or early August. We have already heard from our own sources that early July is the most likely launch of AMD’s Ryzen 3000 series processors with Radeon Navi GPUs following shortly.

AMD Ryzen 3000 Series Desktop CPUs – Here’s What To Expect

The AMD Ryzen 3000 lineup is based on the new Zen 2 core architecture which is made possible with TSMC’s bleeding edge 7nm process node. AMD has reaffirmed that their Zen 2 based Ryzen 3000 series processors for the AM4 desktop platform will be available in mid of 2019. Back during CES 2019, AMD demoed an 8 core sample of their 3rd Gen Ryzen desktop processor against Intel’s Core i9-9900K. The AMD sample was not only faster but consumed much lower power.

The sample, however, was just the tip of the iceberg as AMD assured that it was still an early version and final clock speeds would be higher in retail variants. Not only that but the Ryzen 3000 series CPUs were later confirmed to feature up to 16 cores as there is space available for a second Zen 2 die on the main chip interposer which should bring enthusiast level multi-threading performance down to the AM4 platform.

AMD has made significant changes to their CPU architecture which help deliver twice the throughput of their first generation Zen architecture. The major points include an entirely redesigned execution pipeline, major floating point advances which doubled the floating point registers to 256-bit and double bandwidth for load/store units. One of the key upgrades for Zen 2 is the doubling of the core density which means we are now looking at 2x the core count for each core complex (CCX).

• Improved Execution Pipeline
• Doubled Floating Point (256-bit) and Load/Store (Doubled Bandwidth)
• Doubled Core Density
• Half the Energy Per Operation
• Improved Branch Prediction
• Better Instruction Pre-Fetching
• Re-Optimized Instruction Cache
• Larger Op Cache
• Increased Dispatch / Retire Bandwidth
• Maintaining High Throughput for All Modes

Zen 2 also includes stronger hardware level enhancements when it comes to security. This further solidifies AMD CPUs against enhanced Spectre variants and these mitigations will be adopted fully by Zen 2. When it comes to Zen, AMD already had strong software level support when it came to security and they have further enhanced it through low-level software mitigations.

AMD X570 Chipset – A New House For AMD’s Next-Gen Ryzen 3000 Series CPUs
As we saw with X470, there were a few features for the Ryzen 2000 series processors which were only supported by new motherboards such as Precision Boost Overdrive and XFR 2.0. There’s no doubt that AMD’s Zen 2 based Ryzen mainstream processor family would come with new features but the main highlight would be support for PCIe Gen4. The X570 platform will be an all PCIe Gen4 solution, which means this would most probably be the first consumer platform to feature support for the new PCIe standard.

That, however, doesn’t mean that AMD Ryzen 3000 series would only be compatible on X570 boards since just like last time, the new CPUs will be backward compatible with X470 & X370 boards too. Following are links to the respective motherboard manufacturers BIOS release for existing motherboards to support 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen CPUs:

They certainly won’t display the same feature set that will be available on the newly launched X570 lineup but will feature fully stable functionality for users who just want to drop in a new CPU and continue using their PCs without the hassle of upgrading the motherboard and everything from scratch.

AMD Radeon Navi Graphics Cards – Here’s What To Expect
We know a few tidbits about the features the AMD Navi GPUs would support such as Ray Tracing which was recently confirmed to be a highlight on the next-gen Sony and Microsoft consoles which are utilizing AMD Navi 10 GPUs and Zen 2 based Ryzen CPUs. There was also talk about Variable Rate Shading being introduced on Navi GPUs as a bid by AMD to more modernize their Radeon graphics card for the mainstream market.

Navi would possibly be the last GPU architecture based on AMD’s GCN (Graphics Core Next) DNA. It was confirmed through AMD’s Linux driver that Navi is indeed based on GCN and has the latest GFX1010 codename while Vega was termed as GFX900. There would be some major improvements made on the Navi architecture in terms of IPC and 7nm efficiency would be a showcase of the new cards, providing more drastic results compared to the Radeon VII which was also 7nm based but was simply a die shrunk Vega 10 GPU (Vega 20).

We have already seen a leaked PCB shot for an upcoming Navi based GPU with GDDR6 memory and some rumored specifications which I have listed down below but one thing is for sure, Navi based Radeon GPUs will replace the existing mainstream cards while the Radeon VII will continue serving the enthusiast market as AMD’s flagship until a high-end Navi card is introduced which is currently rumored for sometime in 2020.