AMD Summit Ridge Successor Pinnacle Ridge Reportedly Features Zen 2

During their recent Ryzen launch earlier, AMD revealed some key details for their upcoming roadmaps. As we all know, Ryzen is powered by the company’s latest Zen architecture, marking a new beginning from the Bulldozer family. We also now know that Zen 2 will replace Zen going forward with Zen 3 to follow after that. According to new information, it looks like we may be getting Zen 2 next year.

Despite revealing Zen 2 to the world, AMD did not mention when that new architecture would arrive. AMD has previously cited a 3 or 4-year cycle which would have put Zen 2 well into the next decade. We also have Zen+ which were revealed with the original Zen floating around as well. The new report suggests that Zen will power Pinnacle Ridge, the Summit Ridge replacement meant for early 2018. Raven Ridge, the APU update with Zen is expected to see a mix of Zen/Zen 2 due to its late 2017 launch.

With the new leak, we can now piece together AMD’s plans a bit better. It looks like AMD is planning to provide a slight CPU architectural refresh every year with Zen 2 in 2018 and Zen 3 in 2019. Those will likely be followed by Zen+ in 2020 which will be more of an update and a true “new” architecture though it will still maintain the foundations of Zen.

One major question that remains is what these updates will entail. Zen+ was supposed to be a 15% IPC increase over Zen, but Zen has performed so far beyond expectations that it is sitting where Zen+ is supposed to be. I expect we may see improvements in the 5-10% range for Zen 2/3 while Zen+ will be more substantial. Areas of potential improvement include the cache, FPU, AVX2, AVX 512 and of course the SMT implementation.