AMD Zen 5 CPUs rumored to be a huge leap in performance - more so than Zen 3

AMD's Zen 5 processors will be a bigger leap forward than Zen 3 chips were over Zen 2, we're told by a YouTube leaker.

This nugget and a bunch of other rumors on what'll likely be AMD's Ryzen 8000 CPUs were provided by RedGamingTech (RGT).

The theory is that the leakage comes from a source who has been pretty accurate in the past, and we even get some benchmarks spilled here.

Those are for Cinebench R23 multi-core tests, with the 16-core Zen 5 flagship apparently hitting a score of 49,000. The 12-core processor returned a result of 36,000 (these are rounded up or down, by the way, to protect the source), and AMD's 8-core Zen 5 CPU managed 23,000. The 6-core chip achieved a result of 17,000.

All these are based on current Zen 5 engineering samples, RGT informs us, so the final silicon is going to be even nippier than this.

As for IPC (Instructions per Clock) gains, we should see an increase of around 20% to 25% here, and that architectural boost will provide the main thrust of the performance increase with Zen 5.

Clock speeds will be notched up somewhat, RGT believes, most likely in the area of 200MHz (the target Intel is aiming for with its next-gen desktop CPUs, coincidentally). While we might see more like a 300MHz increase in a best-case scenario, Zen 5 clocks will not be wildly faster than Ryzen 7000, RGT asserts.

Pass the salt shaker

If the upper-end of the estimation of the potential IPC gain is correct, then, with somewhat faster clocks we could be looking at an overall performance increase of 30%, or close to it, for Ryzen 8000 over Ryzen 7000. Could being the operative word here - scatter huge amounts of seasoning about with all this, of course, although this isn't out of line with some past predictions (including those from RGT).

Moore's Law is Dead, another well-known YouTube leaker, has been slightly more conservative on Zen 5 in the past, not expecting it to get to the 30% mark (and theorizing it'll be more like a 20% jump - which is still impressive).

RGT also touches on what next-gen 3D V-Cache might end up achieving, and the conclusion is that X3D for Zen 5 is likely to provide a similar boost to that which X3D managed for Zen 4.

Arguably, AMD needs to go big with Ryzen 8000, because Intel's Arrow Lake is rumored to be huge in terms of the overall performance gain it might provide. Team Red may have a big advantage, though, in that Zen 5 chips could be out in the middle of next year, whereas Arrow Lake CPUs aren't expected to arrive until later in 2024.

If there's a big enough gap between these launches, that could amount to a lot of lost sales for Intel.