With all the hype surrounding AMD's upcoming Ryzen 3000 CPUs, it's easy to forget that AMD is planning a one-two punch with new processors over the next year or so. Much like the launch of the original Ryzen CPUs, AMD is planning a sequel for roughly a year after the Ryzen 3000 series and it could be a sizeable upgrade over even those super-powered chips.
Zen 2 is expected to debut with the Ryzen 3000 CPUs in the next couple of months and will increase the instructions per clock peformance over Ryzen 2000 CPUs. They will also boost clock speeds, potentially up to 5GHz, as well as expanding the number of available cores for better multi-threaded performance. They may be set to overtake Intel in single and multithreaded workloads for the first time in a decade.
Zen 3 won't arrive until some time in 2020, and won't die-shrink like Zen 2, instead transitioning from a 7nm die to TSMC's 7nm+ node. But that sideways move could be impactful, as WCCFTech reports. It will leverage Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUV) in the manufacturing process, which will allow AMD to pack as many as 20 percent more transistors into a chip, over the Ryzen 3000 series.
These enhancements will also benefit the Epyc server CPus and Threadripper HEDT chips, so all could see a 20 percent boost in transistor count in those lines too.
That could lead to a huge performance increase on what is designed as a small-scale, "tock" generation of CPUs, suggesting that even if Intel can come back strong against the Ryzen 3000-series in 2020 with Ice Lake or something similar, AMD is more than ready.
