AMD Ryzen is a really hot topic in technology right now, with the anticipation that AMD will be pulling something very special out of the bag in under a fortnight from today. More clues to the power of the CPUs that might arrive shortly are provided by some newly uncovered slides, said to be from AMD’s presentation deck at ISSCC earlier this month. Hot Hardware has written up a summary of its thoughts given the slide deck, which it says was leaked by a Japanese language source by the name of PC Watch.
The leaked slides include a pair of colour enhanced photomicrographs of the Ryzen CPU die. The die shots are labelled to help you make sense of what you can see. Above is the Ryzen floating point and integer engine, for example. AMD has previously talked about its super smart branch prediction to minimise command pipeline stalling. You can see this CPU component upper left.
Above you can see a shot of four Zen cores and the communication paths wbetween these and with the L3 cache.
Interestingly Hot Hardware discusses the comparison between AMD GlobalFoundries 14nm FinFET and rival Intel’s 14nm chips. Apparently Intel has managed to create denser chips but, as we have seen noted before, the cluster size of AMD Zen cores is smaller, implying AMD has a lower design complexity requiring fewer transistors.
Higher single threaded performance comes as a result of AMD moving to a more traditional SMT design due to its single larger integer cluster, explains Hot Hardware.
Last but not least, a Precision Boost slide provides more info about this frequency control feature. This tech works alongside AMD Pure Power tech which monitors temperatures, frequencies, and voltage, to provide optimum boost levels at any given time.