AMD will soon be announcing its Zen 3 core architecture for Ryzen 4000 and EPYC Milan CPUs. The Zen 3 architecture is expected to bring a huge performance update and reports have emerged that show that Zen 3 would be bringing a significant, double-digit IPC uplift over Zen 2 architecture that is featured 3rd Gen Ryzen and EPYC Rome CPUs.

AMD Ryzen 4000 CPUs with Zen 3 Cores Allegedly Feature 50% Increase in Floating Point, 17% Increase in IPC Performance

The key features of the Zen 3 cores would be the architecture itself which would be receiving a big upgrade over Zen 2. According to AMD themselves, the Zen 3 design brings an entirely brand new CPU architecture, Significant IPC Gains and Faster clocks than ever seen before. According to Red Gaming Tech, their sources have pointed out that Zen 3 would bring an evolutionary update to the Zen roadmap, offering another big jump in IPC over Zen 2.

It is pointed out that in mixed operations that leverage both integer and floating-point units of the Zen architecture, Zen 3 could deliver a 17% IPC gain on average. It is also stated that the integer ops are getting a 10-12% increase on average while the floating-point operations could feature up to a 50% increase in performance. Integer operations are what most general consumer apps use but in floating-point heavy applications, Zen 3 has the potential to be a big game-changer for the industry and especially the server market (HPC/Datacenters).

We also got to see a major change to the cache design in an EPYC presentation, which showed that Zen 3 would be offering a unified cache design which should essentially double the cache that each Zen 3 core could have access compared to Zen 2. In Zen 2, each CCD is comprised of two CCX, with each CCX having a separate 16 MB L3 cache, even though the CCD contains a 32 MB L3 cache. With Zen 3, the entire 32 MB+ L3 Cache will be available to both CCX's and do note that Zen 3 could also carry more than just 32 MB of cache as pointed out in the slide.

There's also a word on clock speeds, which is expected to get up to 200-300 MHz boost which should bring Zen 3 based Ryzen processors close to the 9th Generation Intel Core offerings. That, along with the massive IPC increase and general changes to the architecture, would result in much faster performance than existing Ryzen 3000 processors which already made a huge jump over Ryzen 2000 and Ryzen 1000 processors while being an evolutionary product rather than revolutionary, as AMD unveiled very recently.

So let's say a Ryzen 9 3950X currently has a base frequency of 3.5 GHz and a boost frequency of 4.7 GHz, its successor can potentially feature a base frequency around 4 GHz and a boost frequency around 5 GHz, which would be pretty good, but at the end of the day it's not about the max clock speeds that are advertised by AMD themselves, but the max clock speeds that the CPU can retain for longer duration. The Ryzen 9 3950X can retain clocks of around 4.4-4.5 GHz and that too with a series of updates (AGESA BIOS) which are still being worked upon.

The real test for Ryzen 4000 line of processors would be their ability to retain the advertised clock speeds which have been a slight cause of concern for many users who have bought Ryzen 3000 CPUs, but still, the performance you get out of these chips is stellar which shows that clock speeds aren't the only metric to go by these days when comparing CPUs and their underlying architecture. The AMD Ryzen 4000 CPUs and X670 platform is expected to arrive by the end of 2020 since AMD just recently finished their Ryzen 3000 line. I think that August-October 2020 to be a possible time-frame for the new Ryzen series launch, but we have to wait and see.

AMD CPU Roadmap (2017-2022)