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Ruslan Avdeev
According to Jim Keller, the creator of the Zen microarchitecture, who has already left AMD, the processors on the next incarnation of this architecture – Zen 5 – turned out to be “frighteningly fast.” Keller, who now leads the startup Tenstorrent, showed off a chart showing the performance of several competing chips from different developers, including data on yet-to-be-released Zen 5 chips.
Image Source: AMD
Keller not only pioneered the creation of the Zen microarchitecture, but also worked in the world’s largest IT companies, including Apple, during his career. In the absence of official information from AMD, his statements are a very important source of information. Speaking to students in India, Keller showed a slide showing the performance of various server CPUs, including chips with all generations of the Zen architecture (Naples on Zen, Rome on Zen 2, Milan on Zen 3 and Genoa on Zen 4), the latest Intel Sapphire Rapids chip , Amazon’s own CPUs, the upcoming NVIDIA Grace CPU, and AMD’s Zen 5 chip.
It is worth noting that AMD server solutions are in many ways very similar to processors produced for the consumer market – both platforms use the same chiplets with cores. In other words, there is a direct correlation between the Zen 5 server chip performance data and the performance of the upcoming Ryzen 9000 chips that will go on sale probably next year.
We are talking about SPEC CPU 2017 INT Rate benchmark data, which is the industry standard for enterprise-class CPUs and measures single-threaded integer performance instead of floating point performance indicators. According to Tenstorrent, the Zen 5 chip was 30% faster than the Zen 4 CPU. In addition, Keller indicated the relative operating frequencies, and here Zen 5 is slightly ahead of Zen 4. It is reported that Zen 5 can execute 23% more instructions per clock (IPC) than Zen 4.
Image Source: Tentorrent
Judging by the performance of all versions of Zen in the ranking, the numbers largely correspond to how Ryzen CPU performance increases with each generation, including gaming performance. If the gap between Zen and Zen 2 was not so big, then with the advent of Zen 3 there was a qualitative leap, and Zen 4, in turn, has not gone so far from Zen 3 either. Now a performance leap is expected with the advent of Zen 5.
In addition to AMD Zen 5 and NVIDIA Grace, all other solutions are already in operation. It is noteworthy that the Grace chip is marked as “planned”, but the Zen 5 does not have such a marking. It is possible that AMD has already supplied chips to partners for testing, but information about them is not disclosed due to the terms of non-disclosure agreements.
However, Keller himself is an important source of information. At one time, he was the chief architect of K8, the architecture of the legendary Athlon 64 chips. Later, the expert moved to Apple and helped it gain a strong position in the smartphone markets through the release of proprietary Apple A-series chips, returned to AMD in 2012 and oversaw the development of the Zen architecture . After that, he briefly moved to Tesla to help develop chips for autonomous driving systems, moved to Intel in 2018, and in early 2023 led the startup Tenstorrent. It is unlikely that a specialist of this level does not have information about what is happening at AMD and about Zen 5 in particular.