Today we’re looking at AMD’s next-generation Zen 6 CPU core family. We’ll explore the changes from Zen 5 and what the differences between Zen 6 and Zen 6c tell us about AMD’s approach to microarchitecture.
From a bird's eye view, Zen 6 is the natural evolution of Zen5, with the expansion of many OoO structures and iterative improvements found throughout the core.Digging in deeper however tells a different story, with AMD heavily re-working several parts of the core, reminding me of the changes from Zen 1 to Zen 2.
At a high level the changes AMD made to the integer schedules stand out, returning to a layout reminiscent of Zen 3 and Zen 4.
Zen 5 had the best direction predictor of any core we have measured and Zen 6 seemingly builds upon that same direction predictor.
