AMD Reveals More Zen 5 CPU Core Details

As a follow-up to last week's AMD Zen 5 overview with the Ryzen 9000 series and Ryzen AI 300 series, today the embargo has lifted on some additional Zen 5 CPU core details.

AMD hosted a Zen 5 architecture deep-dive this week ahead of the Ryzen AI 300 series laptops and Ryzen 9000 series desktop processors launching next week. This brief presentation was mostly to go over more Zen 5 core specifics and additional insight on some of the alterations compared to prior generation Zen 4 and Zen 4C cores.

The Zen 5 common features were recapped before diving into more of the Zen 5 core details.

There was a comment during the briefing that Zen 5C is roughly 25% smaller than the standard Zen 5 core. Unlike Zen 4/4C, with Zen 5/5C also has different amounts of cache.

This was one of the most interesting slides for the Zen 4 vs. Zen 5 side-by-side comparison.

With Strix Point all of the SoCs are using the 256-bit data path for AVX-512 in the double pumped approach like with Zen 4. It's for the desktop and server SKUs where we'll see the new Zen 5 full 512-bit data path. I look forward to doing a comprehensive Zen 5 AVX-512 benchmark analysis soon.

The Zen 5 ISA details have been known since the Znver5 patch for GCC earlier this year. Meanwhile we are still waiting on the Zen 5 / Znver5 support for LLVM/Clang.

The PMIC virtualization will be interesting for EPYC Turin. With the heterogeneous topology functionality, AMD has been working on AMD P-State improvements to better handle the heterogeneous topology.

Due to the short turnaround time for the embargo lift and being preoccupied with other testing, this is a very brief article. Plus we are more interested in seeing the real-world performance impact in benchmarks and what material gains there are for end-users in both raw performance and performance-per-Watt.

That's it for now while we are very eager to begin AMD Zen 5 Linux testing in looking at the support/compatibility and super excited to see how Zen 5 performs across a wide range of Linux workloads and benchmarks. Stay tuned to Phoronix to learn more about the Linux specifics of the Ryzen AI 300 series and Ryzen 9000 series in the open-source world.