Ex-AMD & Legendary Chip Architect, Jim Keller, Reveals Next-Gen Zen 5 CPU Performance, Frequency & Power Estimates

Jim Keller, who has worked with AMD in designing several Zen CPU architectures has now revealed the first performance, frequency, and power estimates of the next-gen Zen 5 architecture which is expected to launch next year.

The information was revealed in an event by Tenstorrent who Jim Keller is the acting CEO of and he took center stage at an Indian University to reveal how their next-gen RISC-V architecture featured in the upcoming Ascalaon chips is coming along. During the keynote, Jim also shared some of their own and external architecture performance estimates which included AMD's next-gen Zen 5 CPU IP for next-gen Ryzen & EPYC chips.

While Jim worked at AMD, he wasn't just responsible for designing the new Zen architecture but as the leading chip architect, he and his team of engineers also laid out the plans for future Zen cores. There's a reason why engineers close to Jim are now at Tenstorrent too, as such, they have a good idea of what Zen 5 might be based on the more recent Zen launches (Zen 3 / Zen 4).

Starting with the performance details, we should remember that these are simply estimates and a lot has and can change in the final product. According to Jim, Tenstorrent is estimating that AMD's Zen 5 core architecture is going to be around 30% faster than Zen 4. This will be a massive leap as the Zen 4 architecture itself delivered a 15% gain over the Zen 3 cores. The Zen 3 core was also a massive 30% gain over Zen 2 while Zen 2 was a 6% gain over the first generation of Zen.

All of the performance estimates are based on SPEC2K17 INT (integer) workload which may not be a useful metric for real-world workloads but is a metric commonly used in evaluating performance in the server ecosystem. Compared with other chips, the AMD Zen 5 is also projected to offer an 18 to 20% boost over the NVIDIA Grace and Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids chips.

Following is the full rundown of the scores and do keep in mind that all of these are server chips & not the consumer-level offerings by each vendor:

The power and frequency charts are just as interesting with Tenstorrent expecting AMD Zen 5 CPUs to be the first to breach or hit the 4 GHz mark on the server platform. The EPYC Genoa and Intel Sapphire Rapids families do come close to this figure with 3.70 and 3.80 GHz boost clocks, respectively but it looks like Zen 5 will be the first to hit this goal unless Intel can up a notch with Emerald Rapids that is arriving later this year.

As for the power metrics, they are estimated to remain the same but the 30% gain in performance that we talked about above will lead to even higher efficiency thanks to a 4nm/3nm process node.

AMD Zen 5 in 2024, Featuring V-Cache & Compute Variants With Brand New Microarchitecture

AMD has so far confirmed that the new Zen 5 architecture will launch in 2024. The Zen 5 CPUs will come in three flavors (Zen 5 / Zen 5 V-Cache / Zen 5C) and the chip itself is designed from the ground up with a completely brand new microarchitecture that focuses on delivering enhanced performance and efficiency, a re-pipelined front-end, and wide issue along with Integrated AI and machine learning optimization. Some of the key features of Zen 5 CPUs include:

So if we are going to get a similar jump in performance as we got with Zen 3, that will be a huge deal for the consumer-tier Ryzen users too. Do note that this specific performance metric only takes into account single-threaded prowess so multi-threaded performance may be even better. Once again, we should remember that these are just estimates but AMD has proven again and again that they have the ability to beat early estimations by a good margin and since Zen 5 is a brand new architecture built from the ground up, one should be more than just excited for the upcoming processors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SupjLqPbFpY