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.

They never shipped the zen 5 epyc big cache chip (e.g. 9685X). :( I'd hoped they pulled it to produce a HBM integrated chip instead, but they didn't do that either.

Is this what's helping drive their stock price to the moon?

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.

I looked at game benchmarks, and sometimes 5600 or 5600X were fastest. With all X3D processors so fast that I would not decide to upgrade above 5700X3D or anything cheaper. Now, with current RAM pricing, getting a X3D CPU with 90+ MB L3 Cache seams the way to go instead of doing a DDR4 -> DDR5 leap.

All stated for gaming, that is.

I still love my 5800X3D. Drop-in upgrade from a 3700X so I kept my board, RAM, cooler, everything.

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.

I love my frameworks strix halo box. 16 zen 5 cores with way more memory bandwidth than they should have for a desktop. Only missing the x3d cache

Compound this with Linux users seeing a ~8% gain (and some very big gains here and there) on performance from ongoing kernel improvements too! https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-618-73-amd-epyc

This only goes back one year, to Linux 6.18. Wins would be even bigger if we go back another year. Also, this isn't tracking any of the rest of the improvements in userland: it's just the kernel. Some newer GCC, and upcoming new x86-64v3 targets will all have some pretty nice wins too.

Great days to be on open source. And it only ever gets better.

Am I missing something? Max boost went up by only 15% but the base frequency went up 38%

Better thermals maybe? Less throttling?

As ProllyInfamous mentioned; bringing the cores to the top helped reduce heat, which allows them to boost higher for longer periods then the 7800x3d.

>>Better thermals maybe?

One of the biggest improvements to the Ryzen 7 X3D series (e.g. 9800) is that the caches have been moved from one side of the die (to the other), which places the major heat source closer to the heat sinks.

SO yes, less heat throttling.

Smaller node size means less voltage.

Power is heat, and the amount dissipated is the square of the voltage- a processor that is reliable at less voltage means you can get a lot more frequency in the same heat envelope.

Yet reliability decreases as frequency goes up, and that can only be stabilized by adding more voltage- so the faster you run the processor, the more voltage you ultimately have to give it, so the power/heat produced grows exponentially until you can't get rid of the heat fast enough (at which point your only option is to actively cool the chip).

This is overclocking 101.

Note that classic overclocking was viable because of arbitrage- buying a processor, pushing it to the point it got too hot, and stress-testing it at that temperature to ensure reliable operation. Processor manufacturers all do that formal verification at the factory now as they'd be uncompetitive otherwise, especially in laptops.

its manufactured on a smaller node so probably has more leeway for higher freq on all core loads.

I’d also be weary of single core scores,Geekbench is known to be favoring specialized instruction sets like AVX or encryption extensions more and more as the version number progresses. Though I don’t know if GB6 is also like this I wouldn’t be surprised it it was caused by it.

It would have been funny if the "how" had been dropped to end with "Did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?"