AMD: Zen 4 and 5 to be extremely competitive

AnandTech had an interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su that touched various hot topics, including future CPU and GPU architectures, the chip shortages, and the impact of tariffs. You can check the full piece over here.

There's some interesting insight here and there, but overall nothing earth shattering. Su promised AMD is working on making Zen 4 and Zen 5 "extremely competitive." When queried about the current Zen 3 lineup has the same core counts as the previous generation, Su replied that these are not the limits and that core counts will be pushed higher as they scale the rest of the system:

The topic came up that perhaps current 8-core on mobile, 16-core on desktop, and 64-core on enterprise were fundamental functional limits for these markets, in light of this round of products having the same core counts as the previous generations. Lisa commented that ‘There will be more core counts in the future – I would not say those are the limits! It will come as we scale the rest of the system.’ To that point, AMD’s design philosophy was a question on table, given that these design teams have a slow flow of personnel in and out of them. Lisa explained that:

‘Mark, Mike, and the teams have done a phenomenal job. We are as good as we are with the product today, but with our ambitious roadmaps, we are focusing on Zen 4 and Zen 5 to be extremely competitive. Also on GPUs, David Wang and the team focus on our long term roadmaps, and we pick the right mix of risk to get innovation, performance, and predictability. Bets are made, and we track the progress. We’re happy with RDNA2 on performance per watt, and overall performance, and we have a lot of focus on RDNA3. On elements such as AI specific integration, we are making investments. CDNA launched in November, and you will see us adding more AI capability to our CPUs and GPUs.’