AMD Zen 3 to offer four threads per core?

Posted on Monday, September 30 2019 @ 13:12 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
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Intel's Hyper-Threading has been around since 2001. This feature made it possible to run two threads simultaneously on a single processor core. AMD's introduced SMT (Simultaneous Multi Threading) with its Ryzen CPUs in 2017 and now it appears the company is planning to double the number of threads its CPUs can execute.

In the server market, there are chips that can run up to eight threads simultaneously, like the IBM Power9 and the Oracle SPARC M8. So far, we haven't seen consumer chips that can execute more than two threads on a single core but it appears the AMD Zen 3 architecture will change that.

WCCF Tech picked up a rumor that Zen 3 will have SMT4, a feature that will enable processors to run four threads on a single core.
As CPU microarchitectures become more complex and as the cores get bigger and bigger some parts of the pipeline grow underutilized and inefficiencies are bound to inherently show up whilst existing ones could grow more exaggerated. This is why SMT makes sense to begin with, and enabling the design to take advantage of these inefficiencies and underutilized resources by executing additional threads per core may be the right solution, if done right and not at the expense of single threaded performance.
If the rumor is accurate, it will be interesting to see how these quad-threaded cores will perform. Perhaps the server market will benefit most from this.


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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