AMD’s Zen 6 Family: Feeding the Beast

Hello you fine Internet folks,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.Hope y’all enjoy!OverviewFrom 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.Branch PredictionZen 5 had the best direction predictor of any core we have measured and Zen 6 seemingly builds upon that same direction predictor.The biggest difference we do see is in what happens once the direction predictor gets overwhelmed. Both cores hit that wall in about the same place and…

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