Rumor mill now seems to agree: AMD Zen 5 may be 20% faster than Ryzen 7000 CPUs

AMD's next-gen Zen 5 processors are once again the subject of chatter on the grapevine, with a YouTube leaker toning down expectations (slightly) on how fast Ryzen 8000 chips could be.

The latest video from RedGamingTech (RGT) still sticks to the line that Zen 5 might offer an IPC (Instructions per Clock) uplift of between 20% and 25%, as the YouTuber said in their last leak.

This time around, though, RGT notes that while multiple sources in both cases are pegging IPC gains at about 20% and 25% respectively, the leaker believes that 20% is the more likely figure.

That's a slight step down from previous assertions - indeed, there was talk of even getting towards 30% for single-core performance - and interestingly, it corroborates with what another big YouTube leaker has been saying.

That would be Moore's Law is Dead (MLID), who has claimed for a while now that a 20% IPC jump for Zen 5 looks like the most likely scenario. MLID is actually a touch more conservative, also having mulled 15% as a possibility in the past, but most recently said that 20% was the most realistic estimation at this point.

Of course, that's all this is - estimations and educated guesswork based on insider sources - but the fact that it's all solidifying around that 20% performance boost mark is somewhat telling.

That would, of course, be a good result for AMD, given that Zen 5 chips should be out in the first half of 2024 (perhaps fairly early on), and we're really not sure what Intel has up its sleeve for the next step forward for its Core desktop CPUs. (We may not see a new flagship until Arrow Lake, possibly later in 2024).

Flagship cores

RGT shares some other updates on Zen 5 in this video, too, notably that we can expect AMD to stick with a 16-core (32-thread) flagship Ryzen 8000 CPU, though a beefier model was supposedly considered.

MLID has chipped in on that topic before, too, and agrees that a 16-core CPU will be the top model - but that AMD hasn't ruled out a 32-core (64-thread) model for later in the lifespan of Zen 5. That could well depend on what Intel produces, and whether AMD even needs to push any harder on the flagship front.

Finally, RGT also mentions cache size for Zen 5 chips, and the leaker has changed tune somewhat here, too. RGT previously thought that both L1 and L2 caches would be made bigger with Ryzen 8000 processors, but apparently AMD is set to stick with the same L2 size (and just beef up the L1 cache).

RGT further explains that AMD may have tested a larger L2 cache, and this is what the source of the previous leak picked up on - but seemingly, this isn't happening, it was just testing.

As ever, pile on the seasoning with these kinds of leaks where the product is still a long way off.