I have been covering AMD's Zen architecture for a while;- I was in fact one of the first tech press in the world to cover the architecture before it had even officially been confirmed to exist (9 or so years ago) and revealed to the world. I called out the threat that Zen posed to Intel when sell-side analysts were still pricing AMD at a mere dollar and encouraging people to sell. Structural shifts like a major architectural update can be hard to see for an industry that is flooded by leaks & rumors of inconsistent accuracy and a large amount of inertia in the supply chain. However, it is not impossible - and unless I am very much mistaken - history is about to repeat itself.
While going through the materials for this article, I felt a sense of deja vu that I had not felt since 2014-2015 because similar to the initial Zen launch - AMD has quietly been working on a major breakthrough - and both the creator of Zen and recent leaks from RTG agree: Zen 5 is going to be an absolute monster in the x86 space.
AMD Zen 5 is faster than Sapphire Rapids and faster than older Zen architecture according to Zen creator Jim Keller
A few months ago, the following slide was posted by Jim Keller in a presentation. The video has since been deleted (likely because this probably violates whatever NDA Jim Keller signed) but I was able to find the slide (courtesy of PCWorld) online. It is unclear to what extent Jim participated in the development of Zen 5 but considering he created the original Zen architecture and has clearly marked marked projected values as "projected" (note NVIDIA Grace), we can safely assume that every entry is grounded in reality and hard data.
Zen5 is going to have a higher SPECINT performance than Sapphire Rapids and older Zen architectures. In fact you can clearly see that the Zen5 bar breaks free from the median shown in its generational cohort and is significantly faster than its older family of processors. At the same time, we also see that Jim Keller expects the architecture to have a higher base frequency than the Sapphire Rapids CPU and a comparable TDP to the rest. When this presentation leaked (can we even call this a leak considering it was an official presentation from Tenstorrent?), it was the first reliable leak of performance of the upcoming Zen 5 architecture.
Leaked Zen 5 benchmarks from RedGamingTech suggest it will be the first 16-core CPU to hit 50,000 points in Cinebench R23
Up next, we have this delicious leak from RedGamingTech. You can watch the full RGT video over here. While I always advise everyone to take leaks with a grain of salt - this information can be thought of as pretty much derivative of the confirmed Jim Keller presentation and should be extremely accurate. Still a grain of salt never hurt anyone. According to RGT, the flagship 16-core CPU coming to the Ryzen mainstream segment will be capable of hitting 49000 points in Cinebench R23.
These points are rounded off to the largest thousandth so comparable entries from Intel and AMD's current generation flagships would be about 38000 points in Cinebench R23. This would make the Zen 5 based Ryzen 8950X (or whatever AMD ends up calling it) almost 29% faster than the current generation of CPUs. Of course, Zen 5 is not just for mainstream CPUs - it will rear its head on the server side as well in the form of EPYC Turin - and it is there that it should be able to cause the biggest splash.
So all in all, it looks the CPU wars are going to be heating up even further. All eyes, for now, however are on the GPU side of things. With AI basically stealing the limelight (rightfully so), the strategy that both Intel and AMD adopt to compete with NVIDIA would pave the way for future competitiveness of both companies and even their survival as one prong of the PC triumvirate.
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