Exactly what Mike has done in the meantime is somewhat of a mystery, so I get to probe him on that as well! Currently Mike is in charge of Zen and its roadmap, both for the products in the market today to several generations away from now. His role has evolved from a base engineer in processor design, all the way up to Lead Architect on several of AMD’s key processor designs, all the way to Chief Architect of Zen. Michael T Clark is a Corporate Fellow at AMD, starting at the company in 1993, fresh out of his degree at Illinois Urbana-Champaign. At the time I remember asking him for all the details, but as part of the 5 Year messaging, offered Mike for a formal interview on the topic.

But at the time AMD started to disclose details about the design, it was Mike Clark front and center in front of those slides. How exactly Zen came to fruition has been slyly hidden from view all these years, with some of the key people popping up from time to time: Jim Keller, Mike Clark, and Suzanne Plummer hitting the headlines more often than most. AMD is calling this time of the year as its ‘5 years of Zen’ time, indicating that back in 2016, it was starting to give the press the first taste of its new microarchitecture which, in hindsight, ultimately saved the company.

Rip and tear your guts