Läcka: Zen får en FPU/core - "a comeback in Intel style, in full force"

The shared FPU design was one of the most debated things about the architecture of previous AMD processors. Basically, whenever the FPU was in use by a core, the other core had to wait till the FPU finished its current task – acting as a bottleneck and leading to accusations of the flagship processor not being a “true” 8 core.

[...]

That’s not it either, Zen will be using a scheduling model that is similar to Intel’s and it will use specific hardware and simulation to define any needed scheduling or NUMA changes. It will also be ISA compatible with Haswell/Broadwell style of compute.

[...]

Since Zen also forgoes the double decoder style of Excavator architecture, featuring the single decoder approach, the single thread – single core performance of Zen should be significantly higher than anything we have seen from AMD before. All these seeming minor changes are shaping up to be one giant performance (and IPC ) upgrade and I for one can’t wait to test the architecture when it launches.