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A few months before the official launch of the AMD Ryzen 7000 “Zen 4” processors, a leak tells us more about the future processor, but also about the following ones.
A series of massive leaks, shared by the YouTube channel Moore’s Law is Dead, give information on the roadmap of the brand’s future processors, whether aimed at the general public like the AMD Zen 4, 5 and 6, or data centers with the Zen 4 C.
And although Zen 4 is promising, AMD seems to have planned a much greater performance boost with the arrival of the Zen 5 architecture. Here is a point on what we know at the moment.
AMD Ryzen 7000 Zen 4
Unsurprisingly, the Ryzen 7000 Zen 4 (etched in TSMC’s 5nm process) would bring performance upgrades. The number of instructions per clock (IPC) could increase by 15-24% and single-threaded operations could see an increase of up to 37%.
The clock frequency could also be increased significantly. In what appears to be a very early benchmark, the Ryzen 7 7800X processor reportedly clocks in at 5.2 GHz instead of the 5800X’s 4.7 GHz.
The new CPU would retain the same core count (8 cores, 16 threads), same L3 cache size as the Zen 3 series, but twice the L2 cache. Another major innovation, the new processors will be compatible with PCIe 5.0, DDR5, LPDDR5, thus catching up with AMD on the Intel Alder Lake.
The range will cover a wide selection of processors, ranging from the desktop machine (second half of 2022) to laptops (early 2023) to data centers with the Zen 4 C.
AMD Zen 5, the performance leap
Although its release is still a long way off, AMD is preparing the new Zen 5 series in parallel, which could be released 11 to 15 months after the Zen 4s and the leaks announce a significant jump in performance like that seen with the Zen 2s.
Thanks to a complete overhaul of the architecture, the Zen 5 would offer a considerable increase in IPCs. Clock frequencies should not change significantly. According to the latest rumors, the processors could be made from TSMC’s N3 or N4P processes.
Consumer products are not expected to appear until late 2024, early 2025.
AMD Zen 6, some interesting, but distant optimizations
AMD Zen 6 processors are still far, very far from being commercialized and until then, many things can still evolve. Nevertheless, it seems that AMD plans to increase the number of cores and the clock frequencies for this series.
AMD would also work on a new cache design and various elements to obtain even more performance. However, it is advisable to remain extremely careful with this information which arrives so early in the design process.