According to PC World, when the team was developing the Zen Processor, they focused on two core points that is : to drive up CPU performance as much as possible and to keep power efficiency stable.
Intel led the way in the PC and server markets after AMD encountered design and manufacturing problems with some recent chips. AMD’s CPU performance has fallen behind rival Intel’s, and the Bulldozer architecture.
With Zen, AMD is looking to relive its glory days in chip design. Zen could be as significant as AMD’s introduction of 64-bit server chips in 2003 and dual-core chips in 2004. Both moves gave AMD a competitive advantage over Intel at the time.
The Zen server chips will first reach high-end gaming workstations early next year, followed by servers and then laptops. The chips will have eight to 32 cores, and the 32-core chips could come in quad-CPU configurations.
AMD also changed the cache structure in Zen. It shortened the size of the L2 cache to 512KB and widened the size of the L3 cache. The L3 cache but said it will be much faster than in previous chips. However, a slide about Zen showed at the Hot Chips conference this week showed the L3 cache size as 8MB.
The company also made the chip’s integer and floating point processing units more dynamic and accessible to single and multithreaded workloads. It will take fewer cycles to load operations on the processing units. The designers also sharpened the chip’s execution units. Zen has a distributed scheduler, and it provides visibility to more threads in a window. Bulldozer had a unified scheduler with more complexity.