AMD Targets 32-Core APU with 32GB of HBM2 Memory

AMD APUs (Accelerated Processing units) have been on a rise for quite some time, especially after being used in both current gen consoles, PS4 and Xbox one.

You might have heard of ZEN, a micro-architecture being created by AMD which is capable of accommodating 16 cores on a single chip. Although Zen isn’t available for public use yet, they are scheduled to be released in 2016-2017.

Hinted at in AMD’s official roadmap, the company is currently working on a Zen-powered 32 core APU, to which it refers as EHP (Exascale Heterogeneous Processing).

Each core will be packed with a 512kb L2 cache, and every core will also be sharing an 8mb L3 cache on board making it to be 16 Mb as a whole on L2 cache and 64mb on L3 cache.

EHP also supports any GPU up to 32 GB VRAM and it has all the controllers to handle DDR4 RAMs. Each core is capable of handling two threads simultaneously so that the APU is capable of handling 64 threads at any given time.

It’s a huge leap in technology even by Intel’s standards. The processor is expected to accommodate 256 Gb of DDR 4 physical memory.

EHP also hosts a 32 GB HBM2 GPU, which will be based on the new Greenland technology. The GPU VRAM will be divided into 4 dice, each of which will contain an 8 GB memory stack.

However, all this glory is meant to rival the Intel Xeon Phi processors and it is highly unlikely that we’ll see these processors for general public use anytime soon.