AMD's upcoming Zen 3-based EPYC Milan server CPUs may offer 20% bump in performance over Zen 2 EPYC Rome

AMD promised the release of Zen 3 CPUs by the end of the year, and with the new architecture will come an inevitable increase in performance. But how much will Zen 3 improve on Zen 2? According to the team at the German site HardwareLUXX, Zen 3 server CPUs may be up to 20% more powerful than those built on Zen 2.

This information comes from slides obtained by HardwareLUXX from an OEM insider. The slides, which were not published, claim that AMD’s EPYC Milan server CPUs, which will be built on the Zen 3 architecture, will offer a 20% bump in overall performance over the current EPYC Rome CPUs built on Zen 2.

That 20% increase will be on the 32 core/64 thread Milan CPUs, according to the slides, though other configurations will also be noticeably better. The 64 core/128 thread CPUs will likely see improvements in the 10-15% range, mainly because AMD can hit higher clocks on lower core count chips.

The source also claims that Milan will offer a 15% increase in instructions per clock (IPC) performance for integer calculations.

Zen 3 is looking like an incremental improvement over Zen 2 rather than a radical manufacturing shift. Zen 3 will still be built on a 7 nm process, which AMD previously labeled as 7 nm+.

According to the slides, Zen 3 will shift the arrangement of the Zen 2’s architecture, altering how the Core Compute Die (CCD) and Core Compute Complex (CCX) are structured on the chip.

The slides claim that Zen 3 will have a 32 MB L3 cache shared between all cores. Currently, Zen 2 splits its 32 MB L3 cache into two smaller 16 MB segments.

As with all rumors, take this information with a grain of salt. However, we’ll know how much of an improvement Zen 3 EPYC CPUs offer when they are released later this year.