AMD's Ryzen CPUs Will Eventually Feature More Than 16 Cores
takyon writes:
In an interview with Tom's Hardware (adwalled), AMD's CTO Mark Papermaster has hinted that the 16 cores of the "mainstream" Ryzen 9 3950X CPU is not a stopping point for the company. Zen 3, Zen 4, or Zen 5 based Ryzen CPUs could feature up to 24 or 32 cores:
There are a lot of interesting details that Mark has mentioned in the interview in particular to the next-generation technologies that would be featured on their processor lineup ranging from Ryzen and EPYC CPUs. The most significant detail and the one I would start this article is with the fact that AMD isn't stopping at just 16 cores. According to AMD, there are now many applications that can scale across multiple cores and threads. The addition of cores is entirely relative to the number of applications that can take advantage of those cores so as long as this balance exists, there would not be a saturation point of cores on next-generation CPUs, whether these be mainstream or the HPC server parts.
[...] In the coming Zen iterations, Mark has stated that Infinity Fabric would continue to evolve to keep up with higher-bandwidth interfaces such as DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 (already confirmed for 2021) that would be featured on AMD's lineup around 2021-2022.
[...] AMD is also looking into integrating BFloat 16 on their next-gen EPYC lineup much like Intel's 14nm Cooper Lake CPUs which are expected to launch around mid of 2020. As for SMT4, it all boils down to whether there's enough demand or workloads that can take advantage of it.
SMT4 = simultaneous multithreading with 4 threads per core. The feature has been rumored to appear on Zen 3 or Zen 4 CPUs, although it may be included with Threadripper or Epyc instead of Ryzen CPUs.
A rumor based on a China Times report suggests that TSMC's "5nm" node is ahead of schedule and that AMD Zen 4 CPUs based on the process node could appear in "early 2021" instead of late 2021 or early 2022. The increased transistor density of the "5nm" node should allow for at least 50% higher core counts.
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