Leaked AMD roadmap details Zen 5 and Zen 6 architectures

An apparent presentation leak has been shared online, seemingly detailing AMD's internal plans for its next two Zen architecture versions. This includes codenames, with Zen 5 referred to as Nirvana and Zen 6 referred to as Morpheus. The leak claims to show expected IPC uplift, new features and core counts. 

Moore's Law Is Dead shared these slides via video. According to them, Zen 5 will bring a  a 10 to 15% generational uplift over Zen 4. For the first time, Zen 5 will reportedly have 16 core CCXs. Moreover, the slides suggest the upcoming Zen 5 cores will come with improvements to the L1 cache, increased from 32KB on Zen 4 to 48KB on Zen 5, and a larger DTLB and PWC.

According to the leak, the chip's throughput has been enhanced, with two basic block fetch units, eight wide-dispatch/rename units, six ALUs, and other features. According to the report, the scheduler now has a greater structural size, and the integer scheduler is bigger and more unified than in prior designs. The PowerPoint also vaguely mentions data prefetch improvements, as well as ISA and security advancements. The last two upgrades mentioned in the leaked slides are the low-power core option and the new core count of the CCXs, which increased from 8 to 16. If accurate, it would be the first time AMD has increased the core count of its CCXs since Zen 2, implying we might see a 32-core CPU in the future. The low-power core option would also enable the upcoming desktop CPUs to use a hybrid design.

We don't yet know what kind of cores will be used in these new Zen 5 core clusters. Zen 5c efficiency cores might take up half of the core count, or the whole stack could be plain Zen 5 performance cores.

Additional forecasts for AMD's Zen 6 architecture are included in the slides, claiming a 10% IPC gain over its predecessor, FP16 for AI/machine learning, and a new memory profiler. The last bullet point indicates that AMD would increase the core counts per CCD once again, increasing from 16 to 32 cores. There's a fair likelihood that the second core count doubling will contain “Zen 6c” cores.

AMD's next-generation CPU architecture, Zen 5, is set to launch in 2024 with AMD's Ryzen 8000-series desktop and mobile CPUs. We don't know when Zen 6 is planned to launch just yet.

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KitGuru says: Although performance figures are yet to be known, the Zen 5 improvements shown in the slide are definitely promising. 

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