There have been many claims of how AMD’s latest Zen 5 CPUs will perform, slowly dropping from an ambitious performance increase to something a little more realistic as of late. Now that we officially know the name of the upcoming desktop Ryzen CPUs, they’re not too far away – especially given that Computex 2024 is just around the corner.
Previously, we saw reports from sources such as Forbes that they’d be up to 40% faster, but that amount is now settling down to around 10%, at least for IPC (Instructions per cycle), according to a new post from Lenovo China’s manager. Obviously we can’t know for sure until AMD speaks up, but this figure is much more modest and easier to believe.
10% IPC performance increase hinted at
The figure of a 40% boost has been thrown around for a while now, which would be an astronomical increase – up there with when AMD first made the move to Ryzen. We’ve recently speculated a 4-5% IPC improvement based on the expectation that the 5nm process will be optimized to 4nm.
However, Lenovo China’s manager has made a post on Weibo to say that Zen 5 will have a 10% increase in IPC compared to Zen 4. This is in response to another report that they could, again, be 40% faster compared to the current gen when looking at single-core performance. Do note that the 40% rumor is in relation to just one SPEC result, rather than focusing on IPC.
Evolution of Zen architecture
From the Weibo post above, we can also see that the Lenovo manager reveals an increase of ‘more than 10%’ for a Cinebench R23 1T test, which refers to single-thread performance. But back on to the topic of IPC, how has AMD’s architecture evolved over the years? Well, this article from Wccftech provides a good demonstration of the progress between generations. We all know that AMD really stood out once they started releasing Ryzen processors, and you’ll see why below.
- Excavotor to Zen 1: 52% increase (IPC)
- Zen 1 to Zen+: 3% increase (IPC)
- Zen+ to Zen 2: 15% increase (IPC)
- Zen 2 to Zen 3: 19% increase (IPC)
- Zen 3 to Zen 4: 13% increase (IPC)
So, based on the general pattern we’ve seen in the past few generations, a 10% IPC increase is a good early measure – though we hope to see a little extra once the Zen 5 CPU release date comes around.
