It feels like it wasn't that long ago that AMD released Zen 4 and transitioned to LGA sockets.
But now, the release of Zen 5 is imminent with Team Red announcing it'll be out in July.
So, is Zen 5 worth your excitement? And more importantly, is it worth your hard earned money?
Let's first take a look at cold hard performance numbers.
At least the ones given to us by AMD.
The company has claimed that we're looking at a 16% performance increase over Zen 4
in terms of instructions per clock cycle. And seeing as how the speeds in megahertz
are similar to what we got with Ryzen 7000, that should hopefully translate
to a somewhat comparable average performance increase,
though this will depend heavily on the application, with Blender being one of the programs
that benefited most dramatically in AMD's internal testing.
Team Red says that the IPC improvements are partly due to better branch prediction,
which is pretty typical for a new generation of CPU. But there are also improvements away
from the CPU dies themselves. For starters, Zen 5 has official support
for higher memory speeds. Now, you'll be able to set your RAM
up to JDEC DDR5 5600 speeds while remaining within warranty.
This is up from the 5200 speeds supported by Zen 4.
And a new chip architecture also means faster chip sets.
So far, AMD has announced the X870 and the X870e,
with the main difference being that the latter has a few more usual PCI Express lanes.
Perhaps a bit more excitingly, USB 4.0 support is standard on both chip sets
as well as support for Wi-Fi 7. The launch lineup will be fairly similar
to what we've seen in the past. Two nine series modules, a seven series and a five series,
with the core counts also being the same, but with lowered TDPs outside of the very top end 9950X,
which makes sense considering Zen 5 is on a smaller process node than Zen 4.
But there's something on the laptop side that's significantly different
from what we've seen from AMD before. The first couple Zen 5 mobile CPUs
will have different branding than in the past, as they're going to be called Ryzen AI.
And you guessed it, these CPUs are going to have integrated neural processing units or NPUs
in order to compete with both Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X chips as well as upcoming Intel chips
that will also have more of a focus on AI. These Ryzen AI NPUs will support up to 50 trillion
operations per seconds or tops, making them over three times as powerful
as the NPUs we got with the Ryzen 8000 series,
and more than strong enough to officially support Windows co-pilot plus features,
including that controversial Windows recall function.
Assuming of course Microsoft actually releases it at some point.
Two high-end mobile chips will be available at launch, one with 12 cores and another with 10.
So would we recommend buying a Zen 5 chip or a laptop with one included this summer
when they hit the market? Well, you do get a nice little performance bump,
but seeing as the last Zen 4 already had optional support
for newer standards like PCI Express 5.0 and USB 4,
we don't think they're an absolute must buy if you've already upgraded recently.
And the general attitude toward AI these days seems to be rather negative, especially considering
there isn't yet a super compelling use case for local NPUs on desktops or laptops.
But if you do want Microsoft's AI features on a traditional x86 system, then have at it.
Microsoft has announced that co-pilot plus will be getting GPU support in the future
and other AI tasks tend to run quite well on GPUs.
But laptops save power running them on NPUs, hence the current focus on getting them into notebooks.
What do you think about Zen 5? Are you gonna be checking it out for your next upgrade?
Let us know down in the comments. And if you want to know more about one of Zen 5's biggest competitors,
go watch this video next.