AMD: Zen architecture can last four years
AMD announced at CES that the Zen architecture should last for four years, with an annual upgrade to the architecture. The company has also announced that all Ryzen processors can be overclocked.
AMD’s technical director Mark Papermaster has confirmed the architecture’s four-year lifespan to PCWorld. He compares the architecture with Intel’s Core architecture, which has been available since 2006 and with a so-called ‘tick-tock’ scheme every other year reduces the baking process and then improves the architecture. The company has since stopped the schedule, as it was no longer feasible to reduce the production process every other year.
Papermaster notes that AMD is taking a “tock-tock-tock” approach, suggesting the company wants to keep improving the process every year. The company does not further disclose how it will deal with reductions in the production process, but presumably the company will simultaneously optimize the architecture in the event of a reduction. The technical director has previously referred to the rapid implementation of architecture updates as “Moore’s Law Plus.”
It is not the first time that AMD has indicated that improvements to the Zen architecture will be made after it becomes available. In previously leaked roadmaps, the company already spoke of ‘Zen+ cores’, which further improve the number of instructions that the processors can process per clock tick. It is not known how big these improvements will be.
In addition to making statements about the improvements to the architecture, the company has further announced that all processors in the Ryzen family will be overclockable. However, it is not yet known which processors will bear the Ryzen name. At this point, AMD has only confirmed the existence of a 16-thread octa-core processor. The company has previously announced that the processors will be dynamically overclocked based on the quality of the cooling.
AMD has not yet announced when the first processors will be available, except that it will be in the first quarter of 2017 and does not mean the end of the quarter. Earlier rumors suggested that the processors would hit the market in February. Papermaster has indicated that the company will not try another ‘paper launch’, where a product is brought to market before it can be produced in large numbers, making it difficult for consumers to get hold of it. In doing so, he suggests that the processors will be widely available when they hit the market.