AMD spills the beans on Zen 5's 16% IPC gains With the first Zen 5 CPUs and SoCs set to ship later this month, AMD offered a closer look at the architectural improvements underpinning the platform's 16 percent uplift in instructions per clock (IPC) during its Tech Day event in LA last week. Announced at Computex in June, the House of Zen's 9000-series follows a similar …
It's reached the point that it's not worth buying a CPU because by the time they come down in price to a reasonable level, the next generation becomes available which is potentially a huge uplift. Particularly with Zen 4 which required a complete replacement of every component and was only the first generation for AMD for things like DDR5, so I was never really looking to go with that. But those prices are just now down to "affordable" for the CPU itself, and motherboards are still expensive if you want models with "full fat" features, on top of the DDR5, and now there's a whole new generation of processors and chipsets coming out that are a very large improvement which makes me want to wait until THOSE start to come down in price so I can get the improvements they gained from experience with DDR5. A move from a Ryzen 5 5600X to a 7600X might be a bit of a bump in performance, but not worth a lot of money, and nothing in the 8000 series has any value, but a 9600X could be quite a big boost.
Hasn't it ALWAYS been thus, since the original 80286 days?
You buy the old slow crap or pay through the nose for the new fast hotness.
That's why I still have a i7-3770. Does what I need and I am rarely compute-bound.
Edit: in my current experience, buying a metric assload of memory (32GB) has gotten me better performance than spending the money on the CPU because Linux caches the hell out of things if you have the spare memory.
It seems much worse now, though, because the pace of change is accelerated. The 486 series lasted 6 years, with little changing except clock and bus speeds, voltage, etc. (Plus versions with disabled FPU, and outright removed FPU.) The Pentium Classic overlapped for many years with that, and lasted a good 3 years, plus another 3 years with the MMX variants. Now we're down to 2 years between completely new models from either company, with Intel usually changing the socket and chipset just enough to make them incompatible at least every couple of generations (the last few "generations" have been minor changes from the previous so they've used the same chipsets and socket). With AMD, Ryzen 7000 with Zen 4 came out less than 2 years ago, 9000 with Zen 5 is about to be released, and Zen 6 is already being leaked. We can't even buy Zen 5 chips yet and are already being teased about how great Zen 6 will be. At least give us a chance to get some use out of "the new hotness" before telling us about how obsolete they are.
What 'completely new models'? It's the platform that is key, not the individual CPUs.
AMD have gone out of their way to provide platform longevity.
AMDs AM4 platform came out in 2016, and is still supported. AM4 provided support all the way from the original Zen, through Zen+, Zen 2 and Zen 3, and AMD are still releasing new Zen 3 CPUs even now, which is perfect for people who don't want to just shift to AM5 yet (or some other platform). For example the 5700X3D was released in Jan this year, and the new 5800XT and 5900XT are due out this month.
AM5 came out less that 2 years ago, and AMD have stated they will be supporting the platform till at least 2027, they actually state 2027+ so it is quite likely to be beyond 2027. So that's a minimum of 5 years of support for this platform, but more than likely 6 or 7 years of support.
There is also no one forcing people to upgrade a CPU, it's not like an old first gen Zen 1 1800X has suddenly stopped working just because a new CPU has come out for the same platform! And even if they do upgrade, it's typically a BIOS update and a drop in replacement. No other changes needed unless switching platform.
And no one really needs "the new hotness", it's there if you want it, and some people may have valid use cases to keep up with the latest and greatest, but those are a very small minority. Most people (based on friends, colleagues at work, and forum discussions), generally just jump over several CPU releases anyway. Being say 10-20% faster per CPU generation just isn't that noticeable in the real work, if you wait say 3 generations, you're going to see something like a 50%+ uplift, which is noticible.
Anecdotal, but I've seen a lot of people in comments, forums etc, when talking about their systems, who went out and bought the 5800X3D for their AM4 platforms, to basically max out (for gaming) their existing AM4 platform, meaning they don't need to switch to AM5 (or Intel etc) for another 2-3 years or so.
Don't forget that when the new generation comes out, the previous generation becomes cheaper. Further complicating your buying decisions!
Buy a shiny new Zen 5 chip now? Or pick up a higher spec Zen 4 chip for the same price? (Or even second hand).
Still, it's an easy decision for me right now, I'm skint ;)
Really? I was just about to post about how much CPU progress has slowed down. When I was a kid a new CPU would come out and the older generation would be completely obsolete because each generation was massively faster. Now you can keep the same CPU for sometimes as long as 10 years and still play new games on it.
And a lot of generational gains in the old days were purely on the clockspeed advantage a new process would bring. A 286-16 and a 386-16 were not too far apart in performance, but that was the fastest 286 and the 386 eventually hit 40MHz. Clockspeed is pretty much at a standstill now. Zen 5 is not running any faster than Zen 4 and has to rely purely on architectural advances (which are a lot harder to employ than cranking the clocks up) to be faster.
Clockspeed could work both ways, of course. I had an outrageously overclocked 486 that ran at 160MHz, which kept it competitive with the Pentium 75. The Pentium was an absolutely massive upgrade over the 486 and I'm not sure Intel ever had a generational gain that large ever again.
> I had an outrageously overclocked 486 that ran at 160MHz, which kept it competitive with the Pentium 75.
Oh yes, good times. AMD P75+ chip, 4x locked multiplicator and a VESA-II boards capable of 50MHz board clock (doing only 45, as the CPU did not fancy going the full 200MHz). Had to be actively cooled (unheared of, back then for a mere 486). Did teach me a few things about the worth of a larger cache and could easily keep up with a Pentium 90.
Heh.. .thirty years ago. Damn.
I don’t want to put a damper on any of this but I am curious to know if these new processors still suffer from the same branch prediction security bugs that hit the headlines a couple of years back?
Or are these problems still being ignored?
Same goes for latest Arm and Intel chips too - are these issues a thing of the past now?
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