Jim Keller hints at a 30% performance increase for Zen5
Jim Keller, former chip architect at AMD and Intel, has since moved to other projects and companies. However, his heritage lives on as these companies have only now started the final product development based on the architecture that he helped in designing.
Keller is currently Chief Executing Office at Tenstorrent, a company that took a task of developing AI processors for machine learning. Just this week it was confirmed that Intel’s former GPU chief, Raja Koduri, has joined the board of directors of Tenstorrent.
Meanwhile, the company has just held an event dedicated to the RISC-V architecture in India. This is where he presented a slide featuring various product designs, including their chips. Those are all data-center products, including AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and Amazon silicons. Among products such as “Intel Xeneon” (which is obviously a mistake), we can find AMD Zen5, which is leading the pack in SPEC2K17INT Rate 1 test:
AMD Zen5 projections, Source: Tensortorrent
Keller is using AMD Zen5 instead actual product name because that was not officially announced yet. A successor to Genoa based on Zen4 would score 8.84 points, which is 30% faster than current generation. Notably, it would also be twice as fast as Zen1 (Naples).
AMD confirmed Zen5 is coming in 2025, but the company never clarified what product should arrive first. It is said that the new microarchitecture is to feature optimized performance and efficiency, new front end and wide issue and optimizations for AI.
AMD hinted that the Zen5 architecture, which is to use 4nm and 3nm nodes, will include at least three variants, such as Zen5, Zen5 with 3D V-Cache and density optimized Zen5c. It is not clear which architecture did Keller use for his projections.
AMD Zen5, Source: AMD
Source: Tom’s Hardware
