Amd zen has twice as many execution units as steamroller

Once again we have to talk about Zen, the new high-performance x86 microarchitecture that is being finalized by AMD and whose development has been led by the legendary Jim Keller, author of the best chips in the history of the Sunnyvale company.

AMD Zen will provide a huge performance upgrade over current AMD chips, so much so that it is expected to deliver 40% more performance than the current Excavator microarchitecture found in Carrizo chips. A figure that if confirmed would undoubtedly mean AMD's return to the highest range and finally we would have processors capable of competing hand in hand with those of Intel.

With Zen AMD abandons the modular design introduced with Bulldozer and that has not given the expected results. Zen owns twice as many integer units (ALUs), decoders, and floating point units compared to Steamroller. In essence we can say that each Zen core is equivalent to two Steamroller cores proving that it is a microarchitecture focused on offering high performance per clock cycle (IPC).

Thus each Zen core will consist of 4 decoders, 4 ALUs and four 128-bit floating point units divided into two 256-bit FMACs. Along with this, the premiere of a SMT technology very similar to Intel's HyperThreading to be able to handle a large number of processing threads. In short, a core design with much more "muscle" that will offer much higher performance without forgetting the ability to run many threads.

Regarding the manufacturing process, an important step forward is also expected, the new Zen-based chips will arrive manufactured in 14nm / 16nm FinFET compared to the 28nm Bulk found in Steamroller. This will help to greatly increase energy efficiency and make it possible to integrate many more transistors in the same silicon space.

Source: techpowerup