AMD claims that Zen 3 will offer beyond 15% IPC gains over Zen 2

The Zen 3 microarchitecture is around the corner, and AMD is setting expectations high. Last month, a rumour started on ChipHell forums claimed that an early Zen 3 engineering sample could deliver about 8% IPC gains over comparable Zen 2 chips, but the reality may be even greater.

In a far-reaching interview with The Street, Forrest Norrod, GM of AMD's Datacenter and Embedded Solutions Business Group, explained the changes that AMD has made with Zen 3. Norrod started by clarifying that Zen 2 represented an evolution of the original Zen microarchitecture, but that it had delivered higher than expected IPC gains because AMD had brought ideas that it had not been able to implement in Zen to Zen 2. By contrast, he claimed that AMD has started anew with Zen 3.

According to The Street, Norrod reported that AMD expects around 15% IPC gains from evolutionary upgrades like Zen 2, but was coyer with the gains that Zen 3 could offer over Zen 2. He is quoted as remarking that IPC improvements will be:

right in line with what you would expect from an entirely new architecture.

As Wccftech has inferred, Norrod is implying that Zen 3 will exceed the IPC gains that Zen 2 made over the original Zen microarchitecture. The move to a more advanced 7 nm manufacturing process will help Zen 3 processors achieve "moderately higher" clock speeds too, which will help improve performance over their Zen 2 predecessors.

Norrod also stated that AMD expects to release third-generation EPYC processors in Q3 2020. If the company follows the same release schedule as it did with Zen 2, then we could see Zen 3-based Ryzen processors arriving around a month or so earlier than their EPYC siblings. Ryzen Threadripper processors will then likely follow a few months later in Q4 2020. Meanwhile, we are yet even to see Zen 2 hit mobile chipsets, with Ryzen 4000 Renoir APUs set to arrive in early 2020. Hence, we are well over a year away from seeing Zen 3-based mobile APUs.