AMD Zen 5 CPU Core Architecture Performance Details Leaked

30.03.2024 - 12:37 / gamerant.com / Lisa Su / Dane Enerio

CPUs based on AMD's upcoming Zen 5 microarchitecture are markedly faster than their predecessors, especially in specific workloads, according to known hardware industry leakers. The company has stated that some of the new chips will arrive sometime this year.

In an earnings call last October, AMD president and CEO Lisa Su told investors that the company's next generation Zen 5 processors will deliver significant performance and efficiency gains. As details for these new CPUs have yet to be released, it is currently impossible to compare them to their current generation Zen 4 counterparts. However, new rumors regarding Zen 5 processors have painted the yet-to-be-released chips as being faster than their predecessors, and by a huge margin.

Posting on the forum of computer hardware magazine AnandTech, known industry leaker Kepler_L2 told community members that, core-for-core, Zen 5 CPUs were more than 40% faster than Zen 4 processors in the SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) benchmark. For context, Zen 4 was able to achieve a 13% instructions per clock uplift over Zen 3, which powered some of AMD's best budget gaming CPUs like the Ryzen 5 5600X.

Kepler_L2's statements should be taken with a grain of salt, as the leaker's claims and predictions have not always been spot on. For instance, Kepler_L2 once theorized that it was possible for AMD's RX 7900 XT to become the world's first PCIe 5.0 GPU, but that chip ended up shipping with a PCIe 4.0 bus interface. The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT received a price cut around the time Nvidia was preparing to launch its RTX 40 Super series of graphics cards.

AMD recently confirmed that Zen 5 was still on track to reach the consumer market during the second half of 2024. Kepler_L2 previously claimed that Zen 5's Granite Ridge desktop processors have already entered mass production, adding that a line of Ryzen 9000 CPUs could be announced or even released as early as April. In addition to Granite Ridge, Zen 5, which is believed to use TSMC's 4 nm and 3 nm semiconductor manufacturing processes, will feature CPUs for the light mobile (Strix Point), extreme mobile (Dragon Range), server (Turin), and enthusiast/workstation (Shimada Peak) markets.

Zen 5 will also power AMD's next generation Kraken Point APUs, but these will make use of the microarchitecture's compact Zen 5c cores as well, according to rumors. The upcoming AMD APUs will supposedly have four regular Zen 5 cores and four Zen 5c cores, the latter of which will have lower clock speeds while being much more power efficient.

The AMD Ryzen 5 5600X is a mid-range CPU, excellent for gaming setups. This is the fastest six-core AM4-based processor from AMD and features 12 processing threads. According to the