Zen+

Die shot of Ryzen 5-2600

Zen+ uses GlobalFoundries' 12 nm fabrication process,[5] an optimization of the 14 nm process used for Zen, with only minor design rule changes.[6] This means that the die sizes between Zen and Zen+ are identical as AMD chose to increase the amount of empty space between the individual, now smaller transistors to improve power efficiency & reduce thermal density rather than design an entirely new floor-plan for a physically smaller die. These process optimizations allowed for Zen+ to achieve higher clock speeds and lower power consumption than Zen products,[7] though with only minor revisions compared to the Zen microarchitecture.[6] Known changes to the microarchitecture include improved clock speed regulation in response to workload,[8] reduced cache and memory latencies, increased cache bandwidth, and better DDR4 SDRAM memory support.[9]

Zen+ also supports improvements in the per-core clocking features, based on core utilization and CPU temperatures.[6] These changes to the core utilization, temperature, and power algorithms are branded as Precision Boost 2 and XFR2 (eXtended Frequency Range 2), evolutions of the first-generation technologies in Zen. On Zen, XFR gave an additional 50 to 200 MHz clock speed increase (in 25 MHz increments) over the maximum Precision Boost clocks. For Zen+, XFR2 is no longer listed as a separate clock modifier. Instead, the XFR temperature, power, and clock monitoring and logic feeds into the Precision Boost 2 algorithm to adjust clocks and power consumption opportunistically and dynamically.[10][11]

Ultimately, the changes in Zen+ resulted in a 3% improvement in IPC over Zen; which in conjunction with 6% higher clock speeds resulted in up to 10% overall increase in performance.[6]

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• AMD K9
• AMD K10
• Jim Keller (engineer)
• Ryzen
• Steamroller (microarchitecture)
• Zen (microarchitecture)
• Zen 2