Zen 2

Zen 2 is a computer processor microarchitecture by AMD. It is the successor of AMD's Zen and Zen+ microarchitectures, and is fabricated on the 7 nm MOSFET node from TSMC. The microarchitecture powers the third generation of Ryzen processors, known as Ryzen 3000 for the mainstream desktop chips (codename "Matisse"), Ryzen 4000U/H (codename "Renoir") and Ryzen 5000U (codename "Lucienne") for mobile applications, as Threadripper 3000 for high-end desktop systems, and as Ryzen 4000G for accelerated processing units (APUs). The Ryzen 3000 series CPUs were released on 7 July 2019, while the Zen 2-based Epyc server CPUs (codename "Rome") were released on 7 August 2019. An additional chip, the Ryzen 9 3950X, was released in November 2019.

At CES 2019, AMD showed a Ryzen third-generation engineering sample that contained one chiplet with eight cores and 16 threads. AMD CEO Lisa Su also said to expect more than eight cores in the final lineup. At Computex 2019, AMD revealed that the Zen 2 "Matisse" processors would feature up to 12 cores, and a few weeks later a 16 core processor was also revealed at E3 2019, being the aforementioned Ryzen 9 3950X.

Zen 2 includes hardware mitigations to the Spectre security vulnerability. Zen 2-based EPYC server CPUs use a design in which multiple CPU dies (up to eight in total) manufactured on a 7 nm process ("chiplets") are combined with a 14nm I/O die (as opposed to the 12nm IOD on Matisse variants) on each multi-chip module (MCM) package. Using this, up to 64 physical cores and 128 total compute threads (with simultaneous multithreading) are supported per socket. This architecture is nearly identical to the layout of the "pro-consumer" flagship processor Threadripper 3990X. Zen 2 delivers about 15% more instructions per clock than Zen and Zen+, the 14- and 12-nm microarchitectures utilized on first and second generation Ryzen, respectively.

The Steam Deck, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S all use chips based on the Zen 2 microarchitecture, with proprietary tweaks and different configurations in each system's implementation than AMD sells in its own commercially available APUs.