AMD Next-Gen Zen 3 Based Ryzen 4000 Desktop & EPYC Milan Server CPUs Arriving Late 2020

[Mark-x]

During its Financial Analyst Day, AMD presented it's latest CPU roadmaps and confirmed that the next-generation Zen 3 based Ryzen & EPYC Milan CPUs are arriving later this year. Based on a 7nm process node, the new Zen 3 based CPU families are going to deliver a huge leap in performance per watt and IPC gains.Once again, most of the details are something that we already knew and AMD just reaffirmed those. According to the latest roadmap, AMD will be launching its Zen 3 CPU architecture this year in two key product families, the 4th Generation Ryzen 4000 series desktop processors and the 3rd Generation EPYC Milan server processors.

 

AMD has listed Zen 3 as 7nm (previously referred to as 7nm+) since it caused confusion as many thought it was AMD referring to TSMC's 7nm EUV node but the company has stated that they've not unveiled the process node officially as of yet and will do so at a later date. Coming to the new roadmap, we see Zen 3 (7nm) listed as a 2020 part with Zen 4 (5nm) replacing in in 2021. Since the Zen 3 parts are shipping in late 2020, it is highly likely that Zen 4 chips would follow suit and could hit the market by end of 2021 or even early 2022.

 

The AMD Ryzen 3000 CPUs based on the Zen 2 architecture have seen an incredible response by the PC industry with a total of 260+ Million Zen cores being shipped to date and the bar keeps on rising. It looks like the Zen 3 launch is going to bring even more momentum to AMD's CPU segment and the overall market share.Moving on to the server-side of things, AMD confirmed that its 3rd Generation EPYC Milan lineup will be shipping in late 2020. The new lineup is expected to continue performance leadership in the server segment.

 

The AMD EPYC Milan processors would succeed the current EPYC Rome lineup. The fundamental change for the EPYC Milan lineup would be the new Zen 3 core architecture which will be based upon an advanced 7nm process node. From what we know and what AMD has officially shown, the AMD Zen 3 based EPYC Milan processors would focus primarily on performance per watt enhancements but that doesn't mean we won't be looking at core updates.Another interesting detail for the core design itself was shared during the presentation. AMD has shown that unlike Zen 2 which has 16 MB of L3 cache per CCX within a CCD, Zen 3 would feature a shared cache (32 MB+) for each die. This would allow all cores to share the entirety of the L3 cache available on the die rather than each CCX having its smaller and separate cache shared among the cores. This may also be a potential confirmation of Milan offering 8 Zen 3 cores within a single CCX.

 

The AMD EPYC Genoa processors based on the Zen 4 core architecture were a mystery until AMD officially unveiled them in their latest roadmap during the EPYC Rome launch. Currently in-design with a planned launch by 2021, the Genoa lineup would bring a brand new set of features to the server landscape.AMD announced that EPYC Genoa would be compatible with the new SP5 platform which brings a new socket so SP3 compatibility would exist up till EPYC Milan. The EPYC Genoa processors would also feature support for new memory and new capabilities. It looks like AMD would definitely be jumping on board the DDR5 bandwagon in 2021. Since DDR5 comes with Zen 4, it is possible that AMD's Ryzen and Threadripper lines would also feature support for the new memory interface. It is also stated that new capabilities would be introduced on EPYC Genoa which sounds like a hint at the new PCIe 5.0 protocol which would double the bandwidth of PCIe 4.0, offering 128 Gbps link speeds across an x16 interface.