Leaked AMD Slide Reveals Zen CPU Core Block Diagram

A diagram has leaked ahead of a May 6th embargo, appearing to introduce AMD’s Zen micro-architecture. While this should be taken with a pinch of salt, the slide looks to be from an internal AMD presentation detailing a block diagram of the upcoming CPU.

The Zen architecture is set to feature inside AMD’s upcoming Summit Ridge microprocessor family, and this block diagram reveals AMD is renewing focus on per-core performance rather than delivering more cores. The Integer Pipeline of Zen will be widened by 50% in comparison to the Excavator Modules, providing two massive 256-but schedulers.

In the diagram below you can see AMD's upcoming Zen core on the right, and Excavator on the left, the last of AMD's Bulldozer family.

 The design of Zen is much on the vein of AMD’s own Phenom series, shifting away from cramming two weaker CPU cores into each block and providing a single, more powerful core. As you can see on the Excavator, there are two integer clusters while there is just one on the Zen. This will boost Zen's single-threaded and floating point performance.

The floating point scheduler, on the right of Zen, and in the centre for Excavator, is now twice as wide on Zen, with dual 256-bit FMAC units in comparison to dual 128-bit. Excavator was capable of syncing the two together for 256-bit AVX instructions, so it looks as if Zen will be capable of a 512-bit wide floating point unit. In theory this should double the rate at which instructions can be processed.
Unfortunately the downside to all of this is that AMD's Zen won't be seeing the light of day for another year, but this embargoed image suggests we could be hearing a lot more about it comec May 6th.