AMD’s roadmap marches on: the company confirmed the presence of its next-generation Zen 7 architecture, and talked briefly about the company’s next-generation PC graphics roadmap as well.
AMD hosted a day for financial analysts on Tuesday, outlining its businesses for a cadre of Wall Street investors and analysts. Unfortunately, the agenda reflected AMD’s new corporate priorities: with the bulk of AMD’s revenue now coming from its datacenter business, AMD scheduled just twenty minutes for its client businesses. AMD chief executive Lisa Su also identified the datacenter as “the most strategic business” for AMD.
Before it did, however, AMD also revealed some brief details of its architectural roadmaps., where AMD chief technology officer Mark Papermaster announced that AMD was working on Zen 7, its next-generation CPU architecture. That will underpin AMD’s Ryzen CPUs, where in the desktop Su said that AMD commands over 50 percent of the desktop CPU channel.
“We’ve delivered five generations of the Zen CPU,” Papermaster said. “We split it into high performance versions, power and compact, cloud optimized version also used in our networks, but all maintaining a consistency of instruction set architecture. We went where no company was willing to go in the bet we made with chiplets.”
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AMD’s Zen 5 architecture is the foundation of the Ryzen 9000 family. The Zen 6 architecture will debut in the company’s next-gen EPYC processor for servers, debuting this year, Papermaster said.
Papermaster didn’t say anything about Zen 7, though he showed it on a roadmap slide. (That slide didn’t include an estimated ship date, either.) AMD continues to stagger its design teams, assigning one team to each architecture generation and going back and forth. (That means that the Zen 5 team is now shifting to work on Zen 7.) AMD also continues to develop two types of cores for each Zen architecture, one focusing on performance and the other focusing on power.
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Papermaster also provided an early look at AMD’s desktop graphics roadmap, though without revealing many details. AMD is equally interested in improving the performance of its desktop GPUs as well as other edge applications where it can apply GPU compute.
Papermaster also showed off some of the improvements AMD is considering for its NPU roadmap as well. There, AMD plans more AI TOPS and more power efficiency, without going into details.
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Jack Huynh, the senior vice president who heads the Computing and Graphics Group at AMD, did not go into additional details, though he did indicate that AMD plans to move into edge AI as well as its existing markets in the mobile, workstation, and desktop markets.
AMD has a “no compromise” PC strategy he said, infusing AI into everything the company does.
“We’ve built tremendous momentum, and we have a clear path to market leadership,” Huynh said. “Now we’re entering a new era. AI is transforming the PC experience and redefining what compute means across every device in our portfolio. This is not just another product cycle, it’s a once in a generation shift towards expanding our opportunity across every segment. Our next chapter is about scaling the client business, deepening our council advantage, and unlocking new growth with AI at the edge. If I can leave you one thought today, it’s we are ready to lead the gaming and AI PC era.”
