AMD Confirms Zen Successors as Zen 2 and Zen 3

During the first Zen announcement, AMD showed off their roadmap for Zen, their new CPU architecture with a 40% IPC increase. On the same chart was Zen+, the planned successor to Zen with an additional 15% IPC increase. Now that Zen has launched with a 52% IPC increase, where does that leave Zen+? According to AMD though, they are more than ready with successor architectures waiting in the wings.

According to CEO Lisa Su, the company is already working on their successors to Zen, the Zen 2 and Zen 3. As we have previously reported, the company appears to want to keep Zen going at about a 2-year iteration cycle. I guess with Zen+, there wasn’t much room for future released and Zen++ just doesn’t look quite right. While no timeline has been scheduled yet, I suspect we will see them at least a year on out.

The real question concerning Zen 2 and Zen 3 are the IPC increases. As mentioned, Zen+ featured a 15% boost but it seems like vanilla Zen has already reached those numbers at 52% increase (40% + 12%). Now that AMD has a strong base architecture, I expect we will settle down in the 5-15% for each generation as AMD optimizes and iterations on their design. As we’ve seen from Ryzen, there is still a lot more work to be done to make Zen faster.