AMD promises IPC improvement of up to ten percent for Zen 4

AMD is targeting an 8 to 10 percent improvement in instructions per clock cycle for Zen 4 versus Zen 3. In terms of desktop processors, Zen 4 would have at least 25 percent higher performance per watt than Zen 3.

During its Analyst Day presentations, AMD reiterated the claim that Zen 4 will deliver at least a 15 percent increase in performance on single-threaded workloads, but added that the ipc improvements at 8 to 10 percent should come true. The company made a comparison based on Cinebench NT benchmarks between an undisclosed Zen 4 desktop processor with 16 cores and 32 threads, and a Zen 3 variant, the Ryzen 9 5950X. This would show that Zen 4 performs at least 25 percent better in terms of performance per watt and offers at least 35 percent higher overall performance.

During a presentation at the Computex trade show in Taiwan, AMD already showed that a Zen 4 based Ryzen 7000 processor can offer a clock speed of 5.5GHz when using all cores. The company now speaks of “significant frequency improvements” for the successor to Zen 3. AMD also mentions an increase in memory bandwidth per core and support for AVX512 for Zen 4.

The first Zen 4 processors in the Ryzen 7000 series are expected to arrive in the second half of this year. These are produced on a 5nm process. AMD is also releasing Ryzen 7000 with 3D V cache. The successor to Ryzen 7000 is based on Zen 5 by AMD and is codenamed Granite Ridge. The first Granite Ridge processors are expected to arrive before the end of 2024.

Zen 4 is coming to laptop processors with the appearance of a CPU generation codenamed Phoenix Point. AMD has these produced at 4nm and the company combines the CPUs with GPUs based on the RDNA 3 architecture. In addition, AMD reports the integration of an Artificial Intelligence Engine, with which calculations in the field of artificial intelligence can be accelerated.

The successor to Phoenix Point has also been announced. This includes Strix Point with Zen 5 based CPUs and RDNA 3+ GPUs. For the latter, AMD therefore seems to be optimizing RDNA 3 before the company switches to RDNA 4 with laptop chips. The Strix Point processors for laptops should be on the market in 2024.