A teaser for Zen 3 from AMD CEO Lisa Su comes on the heels of AMD executive Frank Azor’s cryptic “tomorrow” tweet. At the same time, Radeon also posted a teaser trailer for RDNA2. Zen 3 has been paired with a date of October 8th and RDNA2 October 28th. It looks like AMD is pairing its CPU and GPU announcements once more.
Concerning Zen 3, we’ve had a handful of leaks. In our first exclusive, we reported that Zen 3 did in fact have one CCX per CCD but the overall L3 cache size would remain the same. This would come alongside an IPC bump similar to Zen 2. We followed that up with more specific details on this IPC bump, which is almost entirely integer related. While some speculated that Zen 3 would also feature a 50% floating point IPC increase, we have not seen such an indication and we have since explained why this is unlikely. Zen 3 is speculated to deliver far better gaming performance than its predecessors thanks to decreased latency and increased integer performance.
We have not had any exclusives for RDNA2 and leaks have been somewhat scant. The top end RDNA2 die is theorized to be over 500 mm2, with the second largest coming in at 340 mm2 and the third at 240 mm2. There are also indications that RDNA might see a refresh and form the bottom part of the upcoming RX 6000 series. The upcoming Xbox and Playstation consoles do use RDNA2, however, and both Microsoft and Sony have disclosed much information about RDNA2. Some key highlights include the small die size of the Xbox APU (which includes CPU cores) and the 2.23 GHz boost clock of the Playstation APU.
Months of speculation are soon to end, thankfully. Though CPUs are AMD’s bread and butter on the PC, RDNA2 might be the more anticipated product. Whether or not the new Radeon GPUs can live up to the hype is unclear. Still, AMD has much potential thanks to its claimed 50% efficiency gain, which could theoretically be used to boost performance 50% while using the same amount of power as RDNA. At any rate, October will be a dense month.
