An Interview with Zen Chief Architect Mike Clark

Zen is one of the most important microarchitectures in the history of the x86 ecosystem. Not only is it the reigning champion in many x64 benchmarks, but it is also the architecture that enabled AMD’s dramatic rise in CPU marketshare over the past eight years: from 10% when the first Zen processor was launched, to 25% at the introduction of Zen 5. I recently had the honor of interviewing none other than Zen’s chief architect, Mike Clark. I only had 30 minutes, but I tried to fit in as many of our microarchitecture questions as I could! Subscribers to Computer Enhance will recognize many of them as ones we’ve collectively wondered about during Q&A’s in the Performance-Aware Programming series - and I’m delighted to report that, as you’ll see, Mike gave detailed answers to all of them. Below is the edited transcript of our conversation. I’ve tried to keep it as accurate as possible to the original audio, while reworking the phrasing to be appropriate for reading rather than listening. ... Read full article.