AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5955WX Processor, 4.5GHz, Without Cooler (100-100000447WOF)

The AMD 'Zen' Processor Core
The Revolutionary Architecture Behind AMD Ryzen™ and Epyc™
It's hard to believe that the first AMD Ryzen™ processors made their way to market in 2017, transforming the realms of gaming, productivity, creativity, and beyond. It's thanks to the dedicated efforts of AMD engineers that made the "Zen" architecture powering every AMD processor available today, from AMD Ryzen™ in consumer desktop and mobile processors, to AMD EPYC™ for servers, and AMD Threadripper™ for workstations. It all started with "Zen".

The 'Zen' Processor Architecture
The historic "Zen" architecture was a shift in the design approach to processors and represented an unimaginable uplift over previous AMD products. There were three main goals with 'Zen' - the ultimate performance, the ultimate scalability, and the ultimate efficiency.

Performance has to be architected into a processor design from inception, and that's exactly what AMD engineers have done. The main focus was placed on a better core engine, that supported simultaneous multi-threading for future-looking workloads; a better cache system and neural-net prediction, for lower effective latency; and a sharp eye on efficiency, for impressive performance-per-watt leadership; and a scalable architecture that could be improved over time. Not only AMD achieved all of its performance targets with 'Zen', but the core design tenets continue to serve AMD customers today, with the newest 'Zen4' found in AMD Ryzen 7000 Series processors.

To achieve scalability, AMD employed a radical new idea for x86 processors: Chiplets. Instead of building larger and more expensive monolithic dies, AMD invested in a strategy to use processor building blocks called chiplets. Each chiplet houses a number of 'Zen'-based cores, and more chiplets can be added to a package to create a higher performance model processor. As of the time of writing, there are 'Zen' processors with only two cores, and there are models with as many as 128 cores. This innovation delivers previously unheard-of scalability and flexibility for the consumer.

Efficiency is baked into the fiber of everything our engineers do. It is not one simple choice, but an unending host of decisions involved in the placement of every transistor, the allocation of every microwatt of power from processor to platform. It is a relentless and unending commitment, witnessed by our achievement of exceeding our 25x20 energy efficiency initiative, and by the leading battery life of our mobile platforms.

This innovative approach allows AMD to continue to deliver leading performance, scalability, and efficiency across a broad spectrum of desktop, server, and mobile processors for both consumer and commercial clients.

The original launch of the 'Zen' architecture in the Ryzen 1000 series desktop processors featured clock speeds up to 4 GHz, and were manufactured on the 14nm manufacturing node. This was followed the next year with the Ryzen 2000 series featuring updated 'Zen+' architecture, which was die-shrunk to the 12nm node and delivered higher clock speeds with about 3% higher IPC (instructions per clock) compared to its predecessor. Despite this modest increase, it delivered up to 15% higher gaming performance due to updates like Precision Boost 2 and XFR 2, thanks in part to a clock speed increase up to 4.3 GHz.

The Ryzen 3000 series desktop processors benefited from a major core redesign, doubling up the L3 cache capacity (up to 32MB), floating point throughput (to 256-bit), OpCache capacity (to 4K), and Infinity Fabric bandwidth (to 512-bit). It also featured a new TAGE branch predictor. All of these improvements contributed to a very substantial 15% IPC increase, and with these processors benefitting from the new 7nm manufacturing node, maximum clock speeds climbed to 4.7 GHz.

The next major 'Zen' revision was 'Zen3', which debuted in AMD Ryzen 5000 series desktop processors. This comprehensive design overhaul delivered a further 19% IPC increase thanks to over 20 major changes, which included: wider and more flexible execution resources; significantly more load/store bandwidth to feed execution; and a streamlined front-end to get more threads in flight—and do it faster. It also transitioned to a new "unified complex" design that brought 8 cores and 32MB of L3 cache into a single group of resources. This dramatically reduced core-to-core and core-to-cache latencies by making every element of the die a next-door neighbor with minimal communication time. Latency-sensitive tasks like PC gaming especially benefited from this change, as tasks now have direct access to twice as much L3 cache versus "Zen 2." Constructed on the same efficient 7nm manufacturing node as 'Zen2', Ryzen 5000 desktop processors increased the maximum clock speed to 4.9 GHz.

The next revision – 'Zen3+' – transitioned to the newer 6nm manufacturing process. Because this product cycle was focused on mobile users, efficiency was a strong focus, delivering more performance and more performance-per-watt. This manifested in the AMD Ryzen 6000 series processors for mobile, which – at the time of writing – hold the top spot in the MobileMark battery benchmark. Laptops with these processors have demonstrated up to 29 hours of video playback on battery. In addition, the performance they deliver in thin and light laptops is unparalleled. Featuring over 50 power optimizations than their predecessors, 'Zen3' proved that AMD can design leading mobile technologies for the world's best laptops.

The newest iteration of 'Zen' is 'Zen4', released in new AMD Ryzen 7000 series desktop processors. Created on leading 5nm manufacturing technology, these processors boast a maximum clock speed up to an impressive 5.7 GHz. Thanks to major redesigns of key portions of the chip like the front end, execution engine, load/store hierarchy, and a doubled L2 cache on each core, the chip can deliver a 3% IPC increase over its predecessor. When combined with the 800 MHz clock increase over last gen, this can add up to 29% more single-thread performance.

While 'Zen4' is the newest version of 'Zen' – and has earned its reputation as the most advanced PC processor on the planet – AMD continues to innovate and lead the PC processor industry. The evolution of 'Zen' is far from over.