Hardware

Zen 5 marks the fifth generation of AMD's winning Zen series CPU microarchitectures that have turned a once written-off company in the processor market back to competitiveness. It seems like just a couple of years have gone by, but AMD Zen is now into its seventh year, and the company has transitioned two desktop sockets, five chipset series, and seven processor lines. The new Zen 5 microarchitecture powers the new AMD Ryzen 9000 series "Granite Ridge" processors on the desktop, the all important Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" processors on notebooks, and the 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" server processors. AMD is planning to launch the new server processors a little later this year, but has dedicated Summer 2024 to its client segment—desktops and notebooks.

The new Zen 5 microarchitecture builds on AMD's proven CPU core technology, and doesn't try anything fancy like its generational counterpart from Intel, the Lion Cove P-core used on Arrow Lake. Zen 5 still brings a double-digit percentage IPC gain over the previous generation, and introduces several efficiency improvements over Zen 4 thanks not just to its newer 4 nm process, but also a host of other innovations. AMD was able to increase clock speeds, and lower TDP across the desktop processor lineup, while still achieving good performance gains.

What's Being Done?

13:30 - the systems deployed for both companies with either one of these processors to within one percentage Point are experiencing the same stability issues even disabling ecores has not fully resolved the issue for one of these companies the error rate also seems to be going up over time on the server side

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ervuwSwKu18

Nice example of real reverse engineering at a low level in a ten minute dense summary, including die level comments on structures. Also, why Broadcom sucks in engineering terms (NDA nonsense).

Edit: link got fucked somehow, use this:

https://www.techpowerup.com/323616/intel-isolates-root-cause-of-raptor-lake-stability-issues-to-a-faulty-etvb-microcode-algorithm

This week’s Stratechery Interview is with AMD CEO Lisa Su. Su began her career at Texas Instruments, after earning her PhD in electrical engineering at MIT, where she played a significant role in developing silicon-on-insulator transistor technology. Su then spent 12 years at IBM, where she led the development of copper interconnects for semiconductors, served as technical assistant to CEO Lou Gerstner, and led the team that created the Cell microprocessor used in the PlayStation 3. After a stint as the CTO of Freescale Semiconductor, Su joined AMD in 2012, before ascending to the CEO role in 2014.

Su has led a remarkable run of success for AMD over the last decade. After decades of being an also-ran to Intel, AMD has developed the best x86 chips in the world, and continues to take significant share from Intel in datacenters in particular. AMD has also been a major player in console gaming, in addition to its traditional PC business and graphics chip business. That GPU business is now increasingly at center stage, as AMD takes on Nvidia in the market for datacenter GPUs.

In this interview, conducted a day after Su’s Computex keynote, we talk about Su’s career path, including lessons she learned at her various stops to the top, before discussing why AMD has been able to achieve so much during her tenure. We discuss how the “ChatGPT” moment changed the industry, how AMD has responded, and why Su believes the long-run structure of the industry will ultimately work in the company’s favor.

If you get paywalled (I wasn't for this post, but idk how this site is set up?) TH has recapped a little bit of it here.

I am genuinely curious how this will work and how games will be supported

The so-called AI engine is supposed to help gamers lose less with features like AI Skysight which scans the game's mini map in real time for threats and then points them out to the player.

Seems pretty wild to release $950/$900 (realistically will be over $1000 out of pocket) monitors with DP 1.4.

The silver lining (if it even exists) seems to be that they are at least focused on more local "edge" scenarios for generative "AI".

2.5 KW PSU, that's a crazy power supply.

Not sure why fans needs USB-C, but what do I know?