That's the part that should get you excited. Zen 5 had a very modest IPC uplift over Zen 4 (including even some regressions), and combined with a similarly modest clock rate gain, it wasn't a very exciting release for most desktop users. Zen 6 seemingly may have a significant IPC advantage as well as, if rumors hold, a fairly extreme clock jump over the current-generation parts. If that holds, this may be another leap like from Core 2 to Core i7 , and these parts are confirmed to be coming to an AM5 socket near you. We'll be waiting with bated breath for the launch early next year. Hopefully there's RAM to buy by that point.
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Zak Killian Contributor Zak is a freelance contributor to Tom's Hardware with decades of PC benchmarking experience who has also written for HotHardware and The Tech Report. A modern-day Renaissance man, he may not be an expert on anything, but he knows just a little about nearly everything.
bit_user It's nice to finally get a potentially independent glimpse into Zen 6 performance, but I'm not getting my hopes up before I see some more serious 3rd party benchmarking & analysis of Venice. In the lead up to every new AMD CPU release, it seems the fan community has a way of talking themselves into unrealistic performance expectations. I'd rather keep expectations low and be pleasantly surprised. BTW, based on much earlier numbers AMD officially released, I had estimated an IPC gain of 10-11%. So, that's a counterpoint to hopefully help relax expectations. Even that much would be quite nice, when compounded by a clock speed boost and core count increase. Reply
usertests bit_user said: In the lead up to every new AMD CPU release, it seems the fan community has a way of talking themselves into unrealistic performance expectations. I'd rather keep expectations low and be pleasantly surprised. BTW, based on much earlier numbers AMD officially released, I had estimated an IPC gain of 10-11%. So, that's a counterpoint to hopefully help relax expectations. Even that much would be quite nice, when compounded by a clock speed boost and core count increase. It probably won't be too long before someone like Wendell gets their hands on Zen 6 Epyc and the IPC picture will become clear. Probably averaging somewhere between 10-15%. Assume lower to be safe. +50% cores and +50% L3 cache is locked in, we're good there. It will be interesting to see the effects of 144 MiB X3D for gaming. The real mystery remains the turbo/all-core clock speeds. If those are impressive, that's how we could plausibly arrive at a 2x MT increase between the 9950X and 24-core Zen 6. Then there are some minor details, like new instruction sets (probably won't be used by many initially), rumored removal of the iGPU, rumored addition of an NPU, memory controller improvements (ideally it should have good support for CQDIMMs), etc. Reply
bit_user usertests said: Then there are some minor details, like new instruction sets Zen 6 has been reported to feature FRED, which showed benefits for some workloads on Panther Lake. That's utilized by the OS, however. So, if your kernel is new enough to use it, then you get all the benefits right away. Its AVX-512 support is brought up to date with Sapphire Rapids, from 3-4 years ago. The main new thing it adds in that area is bit matrix multiply & reversal (AVX512_BMM), which seems like kind of a niche thing and not useful for most workloads or users. No AVX10 support, although the difference between AVX-512 and AVX10.1 is nominal. No AMX or ACE, either. Reply
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