Zen 5 only has 10% higher IPC than Zen 4? [anketa]

Zen 5 is a long-awaited product, it was basically accidentally mentioned back in April 2018, and since then the talk about this generation has not stopped. Unfortunately, it is almost a rule of thumb that products that have been talked about for a long time start to be perceived as iconic. Basically, only on the basis of a lot of attention, great importance is attached to them and thus also great expectations, which are still growing, often to completely unrealistic dimensions.

In this respect it is not Zen 5 exception. Although this is a generation that will increase performance in FP calculations and accelerate AVX-512 support, it is also a generation that during development had to be adapted for an older (4nm) process, although it was originally developed at 3nm and it is still not clear what exactly these adjustments cost. It is also worth noting that during development, AMD ran into problems of a considerable scale, which delayed preparations (for this reason, the company decided to spread the architectural changes into several steps), and we still do not know what impact these problems will have on the form of the final product. So there are a lot of unknowns.

In recent months and especially in recent weeks, there have been reports of extreme increases in IPC reaching more than 30%, more than 40% and the like. Although it is not excluded that in some very specific scenario (eg some BF16 AVX-512 calculations) a similar shift in IPC will occur, it will certainly not be close to the average value. The latter, especially in the desktop, will be affected only minimally by the performance when using AVX-512, because there are still applications that do not use AVX-512 (or use marginally). After all, we already covered this in April:

Against this is the statement of the Chinese manager of Lenovo, who stated that according to his data, there will be an increase in IPC Zen 5 around 10%, maybe slightly more in the single-core Cinebench test. If the average increase in IPC was ~10%, it would mean that the problems that during development Zen 5 occurred, are considerably deeper than expected. On the other hand, the possibility cannot be ruled out that the manager is working with data measured on samples that are intended for the functional commissioning of the platform and are not meant to represent the final performance. After all, it would not be the first time that the manager of the Chinese Lenovo released inaccurate information. One can recall, for example, his former claim that the GeForce RTX 4060 will offer performance at the level of the GeForce RTX 3070 (which eventually turned out to be 29% faster than the new product, see e.g. ComputerBase review).

So what will be the IPC Zen 5, remains very unclear. Before the current wave of strange news, it was said that at the end of last year AMD presented a 15-20% increase to manufacturers, and it can also be mentioned that older reports talked about a shift slightly above Zen 3which would be around 20%.

Want to try your own guess? Vote in the poll and after release Zen 5 you can remind yourself what value you chose.