AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs May Offer the Largest Single-Core Perf Uplift (29%) of Any Other Zen Family

AMD had greatly underexaggerated the single-core performance. It turns out the >15% figure actually meant a much larger 29% generation over generation uplift. This results from a 13% IPC raise paired with a massive 800MHz frequency boost, surpassing even the Zen 3 powered Ryzen 5000 CPUs in lightly threaded capabilities. AMD has done what Intel did with its Skylake microarchitecture and some. The generational gains of all Zen families released to date have been nicely summarized by HXL as follows:

The Ryzen 9 7950X vis-à-vis the Zen 4 client flagship features a boost clock of 5.7GHz, a fat upgrade over its predecessor’s 4.9GHz peak clock. This of course comes at the cost of hefty 65W TDP raise, pushing the peak drain to 230W.

Compared to the Ryzen 9 5950X, we’re looking at a lofty increase of (up to) 35% in gaming workloads and an equally impressive ~48% gain in heavily threaded content creation processes.

In Geekbench 5, the Ryzen 7000 family leads the Core i9-12900K by a slim but comfortable margin, something that only grows in gaming.

The Ryzen 7 7600X is up to 17% faster than the fastest Intel processor in gaming workloads, leading by a slim 5% on average. In most titles, the two seem to perform roughly the same, however.

Modern DX12 games including Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, Metro Exodus, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and Watch Dogs: Legion are the biggest winners gaining roughly 20% over existing Zen 3 parts with the frequency locked to 4GHz across eight cores and sixteen threads.

Courtesy of TSMC’s 5nm N5 process, AMD has been able to improve power efficiency quite substantially with the Zen 4 microarchitecture. We are looking at a performance per watt increase of 28% and 47% compared to the Ryzen 5000 and the Core i9-12900K, respectively.