News for AMD’s expected Ryzen 8000 series and Zen 5 architecture has been slim recently but details of the new CPUs and indeed Zen 6 models have apparently been found in leaked presentation slides (via Videocardz)
First and foremost, the Zen 5 ‘Nirvana’ architecture, which will make up the Ryzen 8000 series, is claimed to have a 10-15 percent instructions per cycle (IPC) increase. This is huge news as it’s the first time we’ve seen supposedly official figures from AMD. an increase of up to 15 percent in IPC will dramatically increase both single and multi-threaded performance and is separate to frequency, as you’d expect from a new architecture.
One of the issues with the company’s existing Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 processors is that higher-end models use two 8-core complexes. When workloads are spread across them, this has lead to drops in performance with CPUs such as the Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 9 7900X, with cheaper models such as the Ryzen 7 7800X and Ryzen 5 7700X sometimes faster in software and games.
An interesting specification with Zen 5 is that it will use a 16-core complex, which could eliminate these issues. AMD made a similar move between Threadripper 2000 and Threadripper 3000, where core complex dies were given equal access to the memory bus and PCIe bus. It’s not the same as putting all cores onto a single core complex, but it still had a dramatic increase in performance that turned Threadripper into an all-conquering high-end desktop platform.
At the very least it should mean that the high-end Ryzen 9 models offer the best performance overall and aren’t usurped by cheaper models due to their internal designs. However, the 16 core complex could be reserved exclusively for low power Zen 5c, or potentially a mixture of both on one CPU, which has been rumored to be happening on AMD’s future APUs already. We’ll have to wait for more details here.
The new architecture will feature 4nm and 3nm manufacturing processes compared to Zen 4’s 5nm. Meanwhile, Zen 6 ‘Morpheus’ details were also revealed. This will feature a further 10 percent increase in IPC and will double the number of cores on a single core complex from 16 with Zen 5 to 32.
The news comes as Intel is expected to launch its 14th Gen Raptor Lake refresh models next month, including models such as the Core i9-14900K, which are expected to see higher frequencies and in the case of the Core i7-14700K, increased core counts too.
