Allen
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Joined: Oct 1999
Posts: 8,839
Ohio USA
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AMD’s Zen 2 7nm CPU Core to Feature Double the L3 Cache Size
Zen 2, despite its name, is actually going to power the company’s 3rd generation lineup of Ryzen processors. key enhancements : Improved Execution Pipeline Doubled Floating Point (256-bit) and Load/Store (Doubled Bandwidth) Doubled Core Density Half the Energy Per Operation Improved Branch Prediction Better Instruction Pre-Fetching Re-Optimized Instruction Cache Larger Op Cache Increased Dispatch / Retire Bandwidth Maintaining High Throughput for All Modes double the L3 cache
we will likely see AMD debut 8 core mainstream Ryzen 3000 series processors with 32MB of L3 cache. A larger L3 means that the system would have to fetch data from DDR4 memory less often, which translates to faster work completion at less power.
Twice as good (in some ways) as something already competitive ain't bad. Gives Intel something to aim at.
One of Intel's strengths (that is a weakness lately) is that they do their own fabrication in their own plants. They have been having trouble with 10nm -- which is years late versus their original promises and is predicted to be "a fail" monetarily. We'll eventually see how far their own 7nm has gotten. Who knows (besides Intel insiders) if Intel 7nm is as far along as it needs to be to compete next year and the year after (so far, they aren't saying).
As often noted, 7nm and 10nm are not to be taken literally as an exact "size" -- rather, its a shorthand for "performance". 7nm, if properly named, should out perform 10nm.