AMD Zen Chief Architect Interview: Unpacking the Secrets of Low-Power x86 Design
2025-03-26
This article presents a transcript of an interview between Casey and Mike Clark, the chief architect of AMD's Zen. The discussion centers on low-power design in x86 architectures. Clark dispels the myth that the x86 ISA inherently hinders low-power design, emphasizing the role of market strategy and design priorities. He explains how AMD improves energy efficiency through microarchitectural optimizations (like TLBs and uop caches), balancing bandwidth and power consumption. The interview delves into instruction set size, cache line size, scatter/gather operations, non-temporal stores, CPU pipeline diagrams, and how software developers can better leverage hardware features, offering invaluable insight into modern CPU design.
Hardware
low-power design