In this episode of Advanced Insights, AMD CTO and EVP Mark Papermaster sits down with Mike Clark, AMD SVP, Corporate Fellow and Chief Architect, to explore the architecture, engineering decisions and culture behind the Zen CPU family. Mike shares the story of Zen’s clean-sheet design, the aggressive performance goals that shaped its development and how the architecture has evolved across six generations. They discuss the “wheel of performance” behind CPU design, the importance of balancing per-core performance with core density, and how technologies including SMT, wider vector capabilities and dense cores have helped Zen scale from PCs to the world’s largest supercomputers. Looking ahead, Mark and Mike explore the growing role of CPUs in the agentic AI era, how AMD is evolving its CPU architecture for increasingly parallel and heterogeneous workloads, the importance of the x86 ecosystem, and how AI itself is accelerating the way future CPUs are designed. *** Subscribe: https://bit.ly/Subscribe_to_AMD Join the AMD Gaming Discord Server: https://discord.gg/amd-gaming Visit the AMD Gaming Community Website: https://www.amdgaming.com/ Like us on Facebook: https://bit.ly/AMD_on_Facebook Follow us on Twitter: https://bit.ly/AMD_On_Twitter Follow us on Twitch: https://Twitch.tv/AMD Follow us on LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/AMD_on_Linkedin Follow us on Instagram: https://bit.ly/AMD_on_Instagram ©2026 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. AMD, the AMD Arrow Logo, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. Other names are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.

 9833      147