AMD's Zen 5 CPU is scary fast according to performance numbers from the actual father of Zen

pcgamer.com:

AMD's upcoming Zen 5 CPU is going to be a beast. So says the CEO of AI chip startup Tenstorrent, who showed off comparative performance numbers for most of the major CPU architectures yesterday including AMD's yet-to-be-released Zen 5 chip. 

But here's the thing. The CEO of Tenstorrent is none other than Jim Keller, formerly of AMD and the man that headed up the development of Zen itself. Short of official numbers from AMD, in other words, this is about a good as third-party data gets. It's not your usual dodgy 'leak'.

Keller was doing the keynote for a Tenstorrent talk(opens in new tab) for university students in India covering the company's latest RISC-V chips for AI models and the future of computing. Remarkably, Keller pulled up a slide with detailed performance numbers for a range of data center CPUs, including all existing generations of Zen, Intel's latest Sapphire Rapids chip, Amazon's in-house CPUs, Nvidia upcoming Grace chip and… Zen 5.

It's worth noting right away that AMD's server and datacentre Zen-based chips are very closely related to its CPUs for desktop PCs. Thus far, the chiplets with the actual CPU cores have been shared across both platforms.

In other words, Zen 5 in this context is directly relevant to the Zen 5 processors that will hit our gaming PCs when AMD rolls out its next new generation of Ryzen 9000 chips, probably next year.

So, exactly how fast is Zen 5 according to Keller and Tenstorrent? Sadly, we're not talking in-game frame rates, but rather SPEC CPU 2017 INT Rate performance, which is an industry standard metric for enterprise-class CPUs and measures single-threaded integer rather than floating point performance.

According the the Tenstorrent numbers, Zen 5 is fully 30% faster than