AMD unveils 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture for its future family of processors

Represents a significant step in the architecture's timeline

California-based chip giant AMD has unveiled the 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture for its future family of processors.

Revealing the new chip tech at an AMD press and analyst event in San Francisco on Tuesday, the company said that Zen 2 represents the second and perhaps the most significant step in the architecture's timeline.

Zen was originally released in March 2017, with the first generation Ryzen.

AMD hopes that the Zen 2 processors, arriving next year, will help keep up with one of the world's largest chip makers, Intel. CEO Lisa Su made the announcement, stating that AMD's focus is on making CPUs, GPUs and APUs, which combine CPUs and GPUs together on the same chip.

"So much has really happened in the last two years," she said. "I've been CEO for four years. It's been an incredible four years. But we are just at the beginning of our journey."

She added that the Zen 2 chips using the next-gen system architecture will be made with 7-nanometer manufacturing; that is, the width between circuits will be seven billionths of a meter.

AMD's chief technology officer, Mark Papermaster, spoke in more detail about the 7nm Zen 2 core and the firm's partnership with TMSC, which will be manufacturing it.

He said that from the outset, Zen 2 will double the core density and halve the power consumption for the same performance we currently see from Zen chips, meaning it's likely we'll see an increase in core counts in future from its CPUs.

He also claimed that Zen 2 will bring a 1.2x boost in IPC performance over the firm's current Zen+ based CPUs, which will be helped along by using a second generation Infinity Fabric interconnect architecture.

However, that's not all for the 7nm manufacturing process. It's long been rumoured that the Zen timeline is already on track to see a Zen 3 microarchitecture, and there's even a Zen 4 already in its design phase.