AMD confirms Zen 5

Intel will fight back with Arrow Lake

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THIS TIME Of the year, companies often put on a show for investors. For AMD, that means official confirmation that we'll be getting Zen 5 consumer PC processors in 2024 with the Ryzen 9000-series. Not exactly a surprise, but it is good to know that plans are on track. Rumor had it that we would get the first models as soon as April, with the V-Cache variants following in the fall. That now looks optimistic. At the event, AMD representatives confirmed a launch in the second half of the year.

Zen 5 is expected to be a fairly major redesign of the Zen 4 architecture rather than a respin, with better branch prediction, more L1 data cache, and six rather than four ALUS per core, plus other tweaks. It'll use the AM5 socket, and follow the same basic configuration, with either one or two Core Complex Dies (CCDs), each with eight Zen 5 cores using TSMC's N4 process. If past form and current expectations pan out, we are looking at an IPC gain of between 10 and 15 percent, but some sources claim as much as 30 percent. We will also see APU versions this year, with RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics with up to 40 Compute Units, which equates to the performance of a Radeon RX 6750XT. Those sound sweet.