Zen 5 looks impressive in early leaks – 22-30% ST Gains!

Zen 5 is coming next year, and early leaks are setting expectations high

AMD’s Zen 4 CPU architecture has already impressed with the launch of AMD’s EPYC Genoa and Ryzen 7000 series processors, offering users huge clock speed benefits over AMD’s proceeding architectures alongside new features like AVX-512 support, and notable IPC uplifts. Now, eyes are on Zen 5, and early leaks have suggested that we can expect big things from AMD’s next-generation CPU cores. 

AMD has already confirmed that Zen 5 is coming in 2024, and that Zen 5 will be a “new grounds-up microarchitecture” that will feature “enhanced performance and efficiency”, a “re-pipelined front-end and wide-issue”, and “integrated AI and machine learning optimisations”. Big changes are coming with AMD’s Zen 5 CPU cores, and Red Gaming Tech released some early information that he has recieved regarding these new CPU cores. 

Some of the information shared outlines what AMD has already said regarding Zen 5, with the YouTuber claiming that Zen 5 features wider decoders that can better feed AMD’s execution units. This is an area of weakness with AMD’s Zen 4 CPU cores, and AMD has already confirmed changes to the “wide issue” areas of their Zen 5 cores. AMD’s execution units are strong with Zen 4, and reworking other areas of their core design will allow AMD to better feed these execution units and take advantage of these strengths. In a sense, Zen 5 will be rebalancing AMD’s Zen CPU cores, enabling increased throughput across a broad range of applications.

Red Gaming Tech has stated that AMD’s Zen 5 CPU cores should enable 22-30% increases to single-threaded performance, though at this time it is unclear how much of these performance gains come from clock speed improvements and how much comes from architectural changes. 22-30% single-threaded performance gains over Zen 4 are huge, especially given the high performance levels that Zen 4 already offers. 

With Zen 5, AMD is expected to make major changes to their CPU cache structure. L1 caches are expected to get larger, L2 caches are reportedly unified across a CPU’s CCX, allowing up to eight CPU cores to share L2 cache. This change will give individual CPU cores access to a larger L2 cache, and eliminate the need for data to be in several sets of L2 cache, effectively increasing usable cache capacity. Things are a little more uncertain regarding L3 cache, especially with regards to AMD’s Zen 5 APUs. 

All generations of AMDs Zen CPU cores have included cache reworks, with Zen+ decreasing cache latencies, Zen 2 increasing L3 cache sizes, Zen 3 unifying L3 caches by creating an 8-core CCX design for Zen 3 instead of Zen 2’s a dual 4-core CCX, and Zen 4 increasing AMD’s L2 cache sizes. Add on 3D V-Cache tech into the mix, and its easy to see cache changes and innovations as part of AMD’s DNA with Zen/Ryzen.  

Right now, it is far too early to speculate about AMD’s Zen 5 CPU architecture with any level of accuracy. AMD has design targets, but whether or not they will meet of exceed those design targets is a different matter entirely. AMD may be targeting 22-30% single-threaded performance gains with Zen 5, but a lot of factors could get in the way of AMD achieving that. What is AMD’s clock speed gains are not as high as expected, or a specific design feature doesn’t work as intended or deliver the desired result? If today’s leaks are true, AMD are expecting a lot from Zen 5 in 2024.

You can join the discussion on Zen 4’s reported 22-30% single-threaded performance gains on the OC3D Forums.