AMD Ryzen got 50% faster in two years—and it wasn't just clock speed
How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?
AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D is 47% faster single-core and 58% faster multi-core than the 5800X3D from two years earlier, per Geekbench 6. Clock speed rose only 15%, so the gains came from a wider core: dispatch width grew from 6 to 8 instructions per cycle, the reorder buffer expanded from 256 to 448 entries, L2 cache doubled to 1 MB, and Zen 5's SIMD units widened to 512 bits.
How do you turn extra transistors into extra performance? You make the core wider, and you give it more to work with.
- jacquesm
I Picked a threadripper for a box that needed a lot of IO and figured that with that many PCI lanes I couldn't go wrong. But I have to admit I've been more than pleasantly surprised by the performance of the CPU as well, it - easily - outperforms all of the XEON and I7 based boxes that I have. The only thing I wished I would have done different is to max it out with 256G DIMMs when they weren't the price of a car.
- Yokolos
I suspect the improvements are even more dramatic going from Zen 1 through to Zen 5. AMD has really hit the jackpot with how scalable the Ryzen CPU is considering how they're able to improve the performance from year to year. This is a stark difference to the FX series during the 2010s, which saw very small YoY performance increases by comparison. Ryzen really is AMD's equivalent to what Nehalem/Core was for Intel back in the mid 2000s.
- robotnikman
The x86 architecture still going strong. I've always though Ryzen was a fitting name, AMD had Ryzen from the ashes and struck a blow to the long dominant Intel.
- kristianp
2 years sounds very fast. It seems to be because the 3d cache SKUs of each generation were released at different stages. The Zen 3 one was a later variant.
First zen 3 November 5, 2020 with desktop processors. First desktop Ryzen 9000 processors on August 8, 2024. So the generations were about 4 years apart.
- tiffanyh
The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D / EPYC 4585PX is a beast for 99% of compute workloads.
It has the highest base clock of any modern AMD chip (4.3 GHz), plus 16-cores, which is already more than most workloads need.
Can’t wait to see what Zen 6 brings early next year. Rumors say 24-cores and another big jump in single-core performance.