Question Zen 6 Speculation Thread

[adroc_thurston]

Which AMD may have with Sound Wave APU.

That's not merchant Si.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Technically, it's not possible to mix different core types each with different ISA in the same SoC just like that. That single x86 core cannot be used for accelerating the emulation of legacy x86 code in an ARM system the way you think.

With a hypervisor like Hyper-V in Windows, it can be done. All Windows needs to do is make the x86 core tied to Hyper-V at boot and then every x86 executable runs seamlessly even though behind the scenes, it's running in Hyper-V. The only serious performance impact would be I/O intensive apps not performing at their very best.

Just consider this: Microsoft made Xbox 360 games work on Xbox One. Crazy different architectures.

The Untold Story of Xbox One Backwards Compatibility - IGN

From Project Trioxide to cracking Castle Crashers to improving the original Xbox games. It's quite a story!

www.ign.com

 

[SiliconFly]

With a hypervisor like Hyper-V in Windows, it can be done. All Windows needs to do is make the x86 core tied to Hyper-V at boot and then every x86 executable runs seamlessly even though behind the scenes, it's running in Hyper-V. The only serious performance impact would be I/O intensive apps not performing at their very best.

Just consider this: Microsoft made Xbox 360 games work on Xbox One. Crazy different architectures.

The Untold Story of Xbox One Backwards Compatibility - IGN

From Project Trioxide to cracking Castle Crashers to improving the original Xbox games. It's quite a story!

www.ign.com

Then, the entire system needs to be virtualized. Not just that x86 core, but also the ARM cores to avoid resource and I/O conflicts. Heavy penalty for both ISA cores and apps.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Then, the entire system needs to be virtualized. Not just that x86 core, but also the ARM cores to avoid resource and I/O conflicts. Heavy penalty for both ISA cores and apps.

I expect both AMD and Microsoft to be crazy enough to attempt it. If Microsoft can "convince" AMD to replace MALL with a stupid NPU, they can make this happen with Zen 6 or a separate contemporary SoC by promising some decent volume in terms of Surface devices.

 

[SiliconFly]

I expect both AMD and Microsoft to be crazy enough to attempt it. If Microsoft can "convince" AMD to replace MALL with a stupid NPU, they can make this happen with Zen 6 or a separate contemporary SoC by promising some decent volume in terms of Surface devices.

I used to think of this a long while ago. If it can be done, it not only benefits M$, but also AMD, Intel, Apple and many many users. It's just too fantastic, but not possible imho. For example, concepts like kernel mode, virtualization, etc are "constructs" specific to a given type of processor and it varies from ISA to ISA. Something the other type of processor won't directly understand. Even if it tries to understand, it just has no simple means to. Both the ISAs will require "extensions" to make something of this scale to happen. And we need a miracle for that.

 

[Hulk]

AMD has the capability to actually cause massive damage to Intel's marketshare thanks to their in-house unreleased ARM design. What if they release their ARM SoC with even just a single Zen6c core for accelerating the emulation of legacy x86 code? Outside of outdated multithreaded software, that will cover almost all x86 applications that are single threaded or poorly threaded while the popular software will just get rewritten for the newer ARM cores.

If this happens and thanks to Intel's stupidity in not doing enough to popularize AVX-512, more than 50% laptop marketshare could get taken by AMD's hybrid ARM/Zen6c solution to the Wintel monopoly. And no one else would be able to challenge AMD without a proper x86 license.


ACTUALLY, https://windowsonarm.org/?status=0

Almost 50% of the listed software is NATIVE already. And AMD has nothing to fear because they are working on their ARM design too. It's Intel that stands to lose.

Good find but where are the digital audio editors, video editors, Coreldraw and other vector illustration apps, so much is missing. Then there are the teething problems that will start all over again I suspect with drivers and such.

 

[Win2012R2]

If Microsoft can "convince" AMD to replace MALL with a stupid NPU, they can make this happen with Zen 6 or a separate contemporary SoC by promising some decent volume in terms of Surface devices.

Microsoft has got a long history of backstabbing AMD, the NPU thing was part of overall craze so easy to understand why AMD went along, but helping to undo your own foundation isn't something any rational company will do, unless they are totally desperate and right now AMD is doing well not to be desperate.

Microsoft is pushing ARM heavily to make sure they don't pay full price for x86 hardware, that in my view is primary reason - AMD will never sell them a lot of ARM based designs

 

[igor_kavinski]

AMD will never sell them a lot of ARM based designs

The next Xbox could be an ARM design.

 

[adroc_thurston]

The next Xbox could be an ARM design.

nope.

 

[Win2012R2]

The next Xbox could be an ARM design.

The next Xbox is likely not exist in the first place - released November sales indicate that in EU PS5 outsold them 1 to 10 (!), and in the USA it's 1 to 4, that's November - this year will be total bloodbath, basically zero sales, there is no recovery from this.

It's over.

 

[SiliconFly]

The next Xbox is likely not exist in the first place - released November sales indicate that in EU PS5 outsold them 1 to 10 (!), and in the USA it's 1 to 4, that's November - this year will be total bloodbath, basically zero sales, there is no recovery from this.

It's over.

I love PS5. But have a ton of respect for Xbox Series X (not S which is total c&@p). Xbox X is actually very good. Sad to see M$ not giving it enough focus.

 

[adroc_thurston]

The next Xbox is likely not exist in the first place

wrong

 

[LightningZ71]

I personally think that we may see a world where Intel is so desperate for revenue that they ink a deal with MS for a high performance APU SOC for the next XBOX.

 

[CakeMonster]

There were official documents from the MS antitrust case IIRC where they specifically mentioned Zen6 and ML upscaling (no surprises there).

 

[Win2012R2]

Xbox X is actually very good

That's another problem for Xbox - series X sells at best 50% of total sales, so even now Sony has got 66% of current gen market, but if you look at hardware spec then real competitor to PS5 got 13% of the market - another 13% is series S that devs hate to deal with since Microsoft decided to save a few bucks on extra 2 GB vRAM, it's complete failure

they specifically mentioned Zen6

And ARM was also mentioned

 

[SiliconFly]

There were official documents from the MS antitrust case IIRC where they specifically mentioned Zen6 and ML upscaling (no surprises there).

Iirc, Mark Cerny said they're sticking with AMD for PS5 for backward compatibility with PS4. Same should apply to PS6.

 

[SiliconFly]

AMD CES 2025 keynote in less than 50 minutes:

 

[soresu]

This is the OG stream from AMD's channel:

 

[Doug S]

Microsoft is pushing ARM heavily to make sure they don't pay full price for x86 hardware, that in my view is primary reason

Yep I don't know why people don't understand this. Microsoft has zero incentive to go to the expense of supporting a second platform unless it benefits them in some way. The only possible benefit is selling more Windows licenses, which means increasing the size of their potential market. There are three ways to do that. One, lower the cost of PCs - if Intel/AMD have more competition they have to charge PC OEMs less for CPUs. Two, increase Windows' share of the overall "PC" market - which isn't just Macs but also Chromebooks. Three, entice people to replace their PC before they otherwise would - that's what the "AI PC" push is all about.

We should all remember that when they decided to take another stab at Windows/ARM it was well before Qualcomm bought Nuvia. They were looking at this as a way to get some lower cost Windows PCs on the market to compete with those lower cost Chromebooks. They did not foresee that they might have some ARM PCs that competed with x86 PCs, that's a bonus as far as they're concerned but not the reason why they did it. Some people like to claim this was about the Mac but Microsoft doesn't care about Apple. The Mac has been around since before Windows, and has always had a small share of the market. It moves up and down a bit over time, but never has been and never will be a threat to Windows' dominance.

I suspect Microsoft is more worried about Chromebook than they let on. It is backed by a company with pockets almost as deep as theirs, and one that relies on post sale revenue (collecting personal information of and slinging ads at its customers) not on OS licensing which (along with the cheaper ARM SoCs) allows for lower pricing. Becuse of those low prices it is used a lot in schools, so kids are now growing up used to ChromeOS instead of Windows. It isn't clear how important that is, but it is a change from the status quo and change is always risky when you currently enjoy a near monopoly in a mature market.

That is also why AMD has no incentive to spend resources developing ARM chips to compete with Qualcomm. They want ARM PCs to fail, not to help them succeed! They won't get involved unless/until it becomes clear that ARM PCs are going to succeed. That's far from clear at this time.

They want to put their best tech forward with Zen 6, not split their focus trying to develop ARM chips as a "backup plan" like some seem to suggest they could/should.

 

[soresu]

Finally starting!

 

[igor_kavinski]

My bold prediction:

Zen 6 X3D will still have a single V-cache die but the onboard NPU will be used to intelligently place processes on the two CCD X3Ds for optimal efficiency in terms of execution speed and power consumption.

On the single CCD 10800X3D, the NPU will decide whether to migrate a process from physical core to virtual core and vice versa.

Perhaps one way they would achieve that is through some sort of light process profiling which can be turned on or off by the user. When it's on, the NPU will collect data about the game or application's process/thread related behavior and proclivities. After several runs, it will have enough data to puts its magic into practice and yield really smooth framerates with almost no hiccups.

 

[yuri69]

My bold prediction:

Seeing the pace of AMD innovation, Zen 6 will have a new IOD + interconnect and that's mostly it. They do one thing at a time. So it took them like 9 years to create a "big APU", or they still keep using K10-like MCM...

 

[CakeMonster]

No immediate prediction, but I'd probably let the stats of N3 over N5/4 guide me, and then maybe adjust a bit for the core count of the CCD's.

 

[CakeMonster]

I'd love to see some speculation about DDR5 speeds for Zen6 though, will the new sweet spot be higher than 6000? Can they raise it by a lot (8000?) or will we be able to just OC our old 6000 kits to like 6400?

 

[igor_kavinski]

They will need to support CUDIMM since the market will soon be flooded with cheap CUDIMM 6400 MT/s kits. Hopefully, Zen 6 will support at least 9000 MT/s EXPO kits for even cheap B950 mobos.

I think 25% higher bandwidth at roughly 60 to 70ns latency would be nice.