What might be a Zen3?
Answer is: what is the inevitable future of CPU cores?
The real power is in back-end and it's ALUs, AGUs and FPUs. As a mech engineer I see these as cylinders in the engine.
Front-end is just feeding them as efficiently as possible. Same as intake manifold is feeding engine. That's all.
The evolution of back-end ALUs was:
- 1995 ... 2xALU Intel P6 uarch, PentiumPro, PII...
- 1997 ... 2xALU AMD/Nexgen K6
- 1999 ... 3xALU AMD K7, Intel PIII
- 2008 ... 4xALU Intel Nehalem
- 2012 ... 4xALU AMD Zen
- 2017 ... 6xALU Apple A11 ... most powerful core today (int IPC +76% over Skylake)
x86 CPUs must move to 6xALUs. When Apple did it then Intel and AMD must do that too. Sure, It will be hard move as was move from 3xALU -> 4xALU, it will need core re-design from scratch, same as Nehalem and Zen were. You don't need to be genius to predict that inevitable future is 8xALUs core design as a next step. Or do you think x86 CPUs will sit at 4xALU design for next 50 years? No. Apple moved from weak 4-cylinder engine to their powerfull V6. However I think we deserve V8s.
What is the evolution of SMT?
- 1999 introduced by DEC in 1999, implemented in CPU EV8 SMT4 in 2003 (cancelled in 2001 by Compaq in favor of Itanium)
- 2002 ... Intel P4 SMT2
- 2004 ... IBM Power5 SMT2
- 2010 ... IBM Power7 SMT4 dynamical
- 2014 ... IBM Power8 SMT8 dynamical
- 2017 ... AMD Zen SMT2
- 2050 ... x86 still stuck at SMT2?
6xALU core still might be fine with SMT2. For high thread server application SMT4 makes sense even for this core.
8xALU core will struggle with just SMT2 from efficiency point. You do not need to be genius to predict that SMT4 for this core is efficient move. SMT4 and SMT8 with dynamical changing number of threads/priority is actual IBM technology, not a sci-fi. Again, you do not need to be genius to predict that next step is SMT-16 (for very wide core and some specific server markets). Does SMT4 still look crazy for Zen3?
And don't forget guys what Kennedy said: "We choose to go to the moon because it is hard, not because it is easy."
Nehalem does not have 4xALU but 3xALU!
Nehalem 3xALU, 2xAGU
SandyBridge 3xALU, 2xAGU
Haswell 4xALU, 3xAGU
Skylake 4xALU, 3xAGU
SunnyCove 4xALU, 4xAGU
Intel announced some time ago that it has been working on the groundbreaking micro-architecture of NGC (Next Generation Core) since around 2017. It is to be the basis for future generations for the next decade.
My guesses / wishes:
L1-I 48KB 12-Way
8 Decode x86 - 2x complex and 6 simple
8xALU / 6xFPU
6xAGU + 3-4xSD
L1-D 48KB 12-Way
New x86-64! - 64-256 64bit registers!
Intel / AMD x86-64 - 16x64bit registers
IBM POWER - 32x64bit registers
Intel Itanium - 128x64bit registers
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