Since we're likely a long way from the release of Zen+ it may not be too late to tell AMD what it is that we want from it. Perhaps a bit of lobbying might have an influence. Probably not but it's still interesting to discuss.
What do you want to see from Zen+?
Write your wish list here, discuss news about it, whatever. We had a massive Zen thread so this one can be the Zen+ thread.
I'll start by saying:
• An L4 cache of some type is big on my wish list. eDRAM. HBM 2. Plain transistors inside the main die. Something.
• A much larger die size to make room for more CPU power.
• A high power process (i.e. SHP).
• Performance library.
• A good quantity of new instructions. Intel shouldn't be the only company that gets to innovate here.
• AVX 1024. By the time Zen+ hits Intel will have something past AVX 512 out, even if it's mainly for marketing purposes.
• The fabric, if it's used, needs to be faster, obviously.
• Continued use of solder. Yay for Zen having solder not cruddy TIM.
• A design that doesn't have rules restricting performance vs. power usage so much in favor of the latter. Regular Zen is designed to scale down to tiny low-power forms. Let Zen+ have bigger wings.
• Hardware for encoding acceleration of HEVC with all the high-quality stuff enabled. GPU video encoding is typically hampered by lower-quality settings being the only thing that can be enabled.
• Have the design make RAM speed less important (e.g. L4 caching). Enterprise users don't buy overclocked RAM nor do they overclock it, eh? JEDEC standards are always hyper-conservative. And, some reviewers will use slow RAM.
Regular Zen can have some incremental improvements and continue to be manufactured. This enables Zen+ to target a higher-performance section of the market instead of trying to be everything.
I'm no CPU design expert so my list, I'm sure, can use some tweaking.
What do you want to see from Zen+?
Write your wish list here, discuss news about it, whatever. We had a massive Zen thread so this one can be the Zen+ thread.
I'll start by saying:
• An L4 cache of some type is big on my wish list. eDRAM. HBM 2. Plain transistors inside the main die. Something.
• A much larger die size to make room for more CPU power.
• A high power process (i.e. SHP).
• Performance library.
• A good quantity of new instructions. Intel shouldn't be the only company that gets to innovate here.
• AVX 1024. By the time Zen+ hits Intel will have something past AVX 512 out, even if it's mainly for marketing purposes.
• The fabric, if it's used, needs to be faster, obviously.
• Continued use of solder. Yay for Zen having solder not cruddy TIM.
• A design that doesn't have rules restricting performance vs. power usage so much in favor of the latter. Regular Zen is designed to scale down to tiny low-power forms. Let Zen+ have bigger wings.
• Hardware for encoding acceleration of HEVC with all the high-quality stuff enabled. GPU video encoding is typically hampered by lower-quality settings being the only thing that can be enabled.
• Have the design make RAM speed less important (e.g. L4 caching). Enterprise users don't buy overclocked RAM nor do they overclock it, eh? JEDEC standards are always hyper-conservative. And, some reviewers will use slow RAM.
Regular Zen can have some incremental improvements and continue to be manufactured. This enables Zen+ to target a higher-performance section of the market instead of trying to be everything.
I'm no CPU design expert so my list, I'm sure, can use some tweaking.