AMD's second-generation AM5 CPU platform is being prepped for launch in 2024. As such, plenty of engineering sample chips are toiling away in underground labs, spitting out benchmark numbers for AMD employees to pore over while furrowing their brows. Some of those early numbers have allegedly been leaked to the press, indicating AMD is making solid progress on increasing instructions-per-clock (IPC) for Zen 5—though, as always, this information must be examined skeptically.
The YouTube channel RedGamingTech is known for posting pre-release hardware details. It has now posted a video with some ballpark performance numbers for upcoming Zen 5 CPUs, both desktop and mobile. The numbers are reportedly based on "late" engineering samples, as opposed to previous numbers based on "early" samples, so these should be closer to what will roll off the assembly line in 2024. The leaked numbers include Cinebench 2024 numbers for the flagship 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen 9 8950X chip, which include 140 points in single-core and 2,400 points in multi-core. For comparison, a Core i9-14900K scores 129 in single-core and 2,194 in multi-core, according to The Verge, so AMD could have a slight advantage in rendering performance.
The slides also include some intriguing numbers for a Strix Point mobile chip running at 35W called the Ryzen 9 8950HS. Compared with the existing 7940HS part, Geekbench scores show it offering a 37% improvement in single-core and a whopping 77% boost in multi-core compared with the current chip, according to HotHardware. AMD is supposedly changing the design of this chip, made for ultra-thin laptops, by going with a 12-core design compared with eight cores in the existing chip.
AMD is also prepping an entirely new chip codenamed Sarlak, according to the video. This 95W chip has a CPU and GPU and appears aimed at Apple's just-launched M3 SoCs. In Zen 5 form, it's called the Ryzen 9 8955HX, and unlike Apple's chip, it'll be too big to fit into an AM5 socket, so perhaps it'll find its home in mini PCs. It'll be a chiplet-based design with two eight-core CCDs and a beefy iGPU featuring 40 CUs, which should theoretically give it enough power for solid gaming in line with a Radeon 6750 XT from the RDNA 2 era.
The flagship Zen 5 CPU will retain many features from the existing Zen 4 architecture, including an unchanged memory subsystem with DDR5 memory and the same I/O die from Zen 4. It's already been reported that AMD is also sticking with 16/32 for the core/thread configuration, which will have the same TDP as existing chips at 170W. As predicted, it will be supposedly built on TSMC's 4nm process instead of 3nm. The latest rumors suggest a launch in the middle of 2024. Currently, it seems only Apple can afford TSMC's 3nm process at scale, and AMD is only a fraction of Apple's size, so this move is unsurprising.
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