AMD Zen 3 Based Ryzen 5000 CPUs Achieved A Massive 81% Performance Improvement Over The Original Zen Architecture

In their generational performance review, Golem.de has showcased that the Zen 3 architecture for AMD Ryzen 5000 CPUs achieves a massive 89% performance improvement over the original Zen architecture. A gain of this magnitude has not been seen for over a decade yet it took AMD just four years to offer nearly twice the performance of its first-gen Zen cores.

Back before Zen came to market, the industry was accustomed to the 5-10% gen-over-gen gains that Intel was delivering. Sandy Bridge being the last major performance jump from Intel while Haswell and Skylake pushed the envelope further but not in a disruptive way like Zen has done. Putting aside Zen+ which was more of an efficiency-focused architecture, each Zen core delivered an impeccable gain in IPC.

The first Zen core delivered a 52% IPC jump over Excavator, Zen 2 delivered another 13% IPC bump over Zen 1 while Zen 3 pushed the bar even higher with a 19% IPC bump over Zen 2. Zen+ offered a more conservative 3% IPC gain but as we said, it was more focused on optimizing Zen for efficiency & those improvements are now seen across the board on Zen 2 and Zen 3 chips.

So coming to the test results which Golem achieved, their test platform included all four Ryzen CPU generations. The 8 core and 16 thread SKUs were used which include AMD's Ryzen 7 1800X, Ryzen 7 2700X, Ryzen 7 3800X, and the Ryzen 7 5800X. Each CPU was tested on its own respective board platform that offered the best support so that would be X570 & X470.

The memory on each board was running at the default spec which is DDR4-2666 for Zen, DDR4-2933 for Zen+ & DDR4-3200 for the Zen 2 and Zen 3 chips. However, modern Ryzen CPUs can support much faster memory & the performance difference is quite huge too when running proper high-speed modules.

AMD Zen (Ryzen Desktop CPU) Multi-Generational Performance Gains in Games (via Golem):

AMD Zen (Ryzen Desktop CPU) Multi-Generational Performance Gains in Apps (via Golem)

As you can see from the performance charts, the AMD Ryzen 5000 Desktop CPUs gain an 81% lead in gaming and a 72% lead in application performance. This is almost twice the performance jump if you compare it with the first Gen Ryzen CPUs. 3DCenter made a detailed chart by compiling the overall average performance which shows off an even larger gain with application performance ending up at 89% faster and gaming being up to 84% faster.

This should give users of older Zen and Zen+ based Ryzen CPUs enough of a reason to move to the latest generation of AMD Zen processors. The new Ryzen 5000 CPUs are not only good at apps but also deliver exceptional gaming performance which puts them ahead of anything that Intel has to offer. But if you can wait a bit more, AMD will be releasing a brand new platform moving into 2021 which is expected to feature support for its next-generation Ryzen CPUs. You can learn more about upcoming AMD Desktop CPU platforms here.