AMD's Zen architecture was a risky bet on the part of the company that has been improving generation by generation. This architecture launched on the market in 2017 has managed to improve a lot in two years, being very efficient. We have gone from 4 cores to 16 cores in just two years, doubling the number of cores every year.
The increase in the number of cores is not the main thing of the current Zen2-based processors. The Zen architecture had the problem that the cores to access more RAM than allocated, had to go through another core. This increased latencies and markedly reduced performance. Zen2 implements the DIE I / O that allows you to efficiently manage communication with RAM and reduce latency.
AMD will continue adding cores to its processors
Mark Papermaster, one of the most important directors of AMD has spoken about the number of cores. It has stressed that it does not see "any imminent barrier" that prevents increasing the number of cores and threads in its processors. He noted that software developers are increasingly taking advantage of multi-core processors.
I don't see any imminent barriers, and here's why: It's just a catch-up moment for the software to take advantage of the multi-core approach. But we've overcome that hurdle, now more and more applications can take advantage of multi-core and multi-threading.
In the short term, I don't see a saturation point for the cores. You have to be very careful when adding more cores because you don't want to add it before applications can take advantage of it. As long as you keep that balance, I think we'll continue to see that trend
The cores in the company's processors will continue to increase, yes, the number of cores will not increase if there is no software support. This could indicate that AMD will continue to increase the number of cores in future architectures, but not in Zen3. This is because getting the best performance from all cores requires development and work time.
Papermaster has also dropped that the frequency scaling will not be as great as before. This forces processor manufacturers to create smarter solutions. A product upgrade is required with each generation, and center frequency is the fastest way to increase performance. The improvement would go through increasing the cores and I / O bandwidth, to improve performance.
Source: TH
