The first technical deep dive of the Zen 5 architecture is here, with preliminary benchmarks supporting AMD's IPC claims

pcgamer.com:

It's been almost a month since AMD unveiled its Zen 5 processor architecture and new range of Ryzen CPUs at Computex 2024. Still, with no products on retailers' shelves just yet, we've not had word on how much better the new design is than its predecessor, Zen 4. However, one lucky person has managed to get their hands on an engineering laptop sample with a Strix Point APU and run a full gamut of in-depth architecture tests on it.

The findings were posted by David Huang on his blog and before going any further into what he discovered, it's worth noting the laptop used isn't a retail version, so the figures could well change once vendors officially launch their Zen 5-powered models. Unlike the desktop Ryzen processors, Strix Point is a monolithic chip—i.e. A single piece of silicon that contains the CPU cores, GPU, memory controllers, NPU, etc.

Officially branded under the Ryzen AI 300 moniker, Huang tested a laptop sporting the Ryzen AI 9 365. This has four Zen 5 cores, boosting to around 5 GHz, and six compact Zen 5c cores, with a maximum clock speed of around 4 GHz. But it's worth noting the Zen 5 cores in the Strix Point APU aren't exactly the same as those used in the upcoming desktop Ryzen 9000-series chips.

The first difference is the amount of L3 cache on tap—where each CCD (Core Complex Die) chiplet in the Ryzen 9 7950X gets 32MB of cache, for example, AMD has taken the unusual step of giving the 'normal' and compact cores different amounts. In the case of the Ryzen AI 9 365, the four Zen 5 cores have 16MB of L3 cache, whereas the six Zen 5c cores have to share half that amount, just 8MB.

All of the cores in Strix Point also have reduced vector/SIMD pipelines, compared to Zen 4 APUs. For example, doing any 128-bit or 256-bit integer vector operations results in half the throughput, per clock cycle, of the Zen 4 cores in the Ryzen 7 7840U processor (512-bit ops remain unchanged).

However, Huang observed that Strix Point's Zen 5 cores had noticeably better