ENTER THE 7nm ZEN 2 CHIPLET

First Ryzen 3 silicon makes an appearance

AMD’S PROCESSOR development schedule continues to run apace. Last spring we saw the arrival of the Zen+ core; this year we’ll get the Zen 2 core, and the accompanying 3000 series chips. At CES, we saw our first silicon. The Zen 2 design uses chiplets, in this case an eight-core 7nm processor chiplet, and a 14nm I/O processor on the same substrate. Tellingly, there was room on the chip for another eight-core chiplet. You can even see the traces laid out for it.

AMD is being tight on details, but it did boast that its pre-production chip could run Cinebench with a score of 2,057, which compares well with a Core i9-9900K at 2,042. It did this while drawing 130W, against the Intel’s 180W.

There are lots of leaks about Ryzen 3 floating about, of varying veracity. One more reliable source lists an entry-level six-core 3300X running at a base clock of 3.5GHz, through to a 3800X with 16 cores running at 3.9GHz. The same leak also has a 3700X, a 12-core part, hitting the magical 5GHz on boost. Sounds good so far. What’s amazing are the quoted TDP figures; even the 16-core monster draws just 125W. All true? Hard to say until it’s in our labs.

What we do know are the clock speeds on the engineering samples. We’ve seen an eight-core chip running at 3.4GHz, with a boost of 3.7GHz, and a 12-core sample at 3.4GHz, with a boost of 3.7GHz. Engineering samples are often run at more pedestrian speeds, so 5GHz is not unrealistic.

The Zen 2 architecture is starting to cause a real buzz. Those little 7nm chiplets are going to be used right across AMD’s range, and there’s room on the desktop package for 16 cores, at the same sort of TDP as current eight-core chips, plus huge L3 caches, PCIe 4.0, and more. Singlecore performance has always been an AMD weak point; Zen 2 looks set to close the gap further. If Zen was a shock for Intel, Zen 2’s chiplets look likely to repeat it.