Now that AMD Zen 2 processors have successfully established themselves in the consumer market with the 3rd generation Ryzen processor lineup and in the enterprise market with 2nd generation Epyc processors, it's time to look to the future. It looks like AMD has finished designing the Zen 3 architecture.
The news was revealed during the Epyc 3nd generation launch event, where AMD showed a slide indicating that Zen 4 architecture design had been completed. They also mentioned Zen 4's more distant architecture as "design". This doesn't mean AMD's XNUMXth Gen Ryzen processors are ready to go, but it doesn't mean AMD is going to slow down after its recent successes.
Zen 3 is supposed to be based on an improved 7nm process (7nm+), similar to how Zen+ followed the original Zen with a 12nm process (12nm+). This means we can expect higher clock speeds with lower power consumption. AMD was able to achieve this by switching to a more powerful 7nm node (7nm EUV) instead of the 7nm node (7nm DUV) used in Zen 2 processors. This technology should make chip manufacturing more efficient and reduce errors.
As for Zen 4, we don't have concrete information about its capabilities yet. Some speculation says Zen 4 will be based on an improved 6nm process and may only be available in 2021, according to some TechPowerUp data.
We don't know exactly what new features the Zen 4 processor will offer on the 6nm process. Perhaps we will see an increase in the number of cores even higher than the 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen 9 3950X, or
, for example, Threadripper 2990WX-level processors in mainstream desktop solutions in the next few years.
Bottom line, we still don't know what AMD Ryzen 3rd Gen and Ryzen Threadripper 3rd Gen will have to offer, and this will give us a better idea of what to expect from AMD's Zen 3 and Zen 4 architectures.