AMD Ryzen 9000 CPUs rumored to only have 10% IPC boost - but let's not panic over Zen 5 yet

AMD's Zen 5 desktop processors - which should be Ryzen 9000, based on previous leaks - might end up with a generational increase in performance that'll disappoint many folks, or that's the conclusion some are drawing given fresh chatter from the grapevine.

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Wccftech flagged up this rumor which comes from Weibo - add extra seasoning because of that, but then again, we are told that this is a post from Lenovo China's manager.

According to that manager, we can expect Ryzen 9000 desktop to bring forth an IPC increase of 10% compared to Ryzen 7000 chips - and that's a much lower figure than we've heard from other sources. Although it's worth noting that the source does observe that gains are higher than this in Cinebench single-threaded benchmarks (without mentioning any exact figure).

The manager was actually responding to claims of a 40% generational uptick, pouring cold water on those - and to be fair, that earlier rumor has been superseded by talk of a much lesser increase from most sources (save the odd one).

No rumor has gone as low as 10%, mind - though it's possible this could be related to Zen 5 still being pre-release chips, perhaps. Also, the source here is talking about IPC, and that does not exactly equate to the total performance increase that Zen 5 processors will deliver.

Having said that, it's still a lowball estimation, and most of the speculation we've seen places the likely IPC increase somewhere in the ballpark of 15% to 20%, or maybe a bit higher at a push.

Averaging the extremes

We really wouldn't get carried away with the overly excitable chatter around massive gains, or indeed the more pessimistic view aired here. The reality is that Zen 5 will probably be much like the previous two generations, which offered 19% (Zen 3) and 13% (Zen 4) uplifts in IPC. So, we're back to that 15% to 20% kind of area.

Perhaps the real key to the success of Ryzen 9000 will likely be its release date, and the corresponding launch date of rival next-gen Arrow Lake CPUs from Intel.

This is where AMD fans can get more excited about the prospect of Team Red pulling considerably ahead of Intel in the CPU wars, as the most recent nuggets from the grapevine contend that Zen 5 desktop is due to arrive in Q3 - with a Computex reveal possibly in the cards next month.

Whereas with Arrow Lake, the rumblings are ominous that Intel may struggle to get its next-gen desktop silicon out before the end of 2024. Given a large enough gap, it's possible Arrow Lake (Core Ultra 200) might end up facing off against Ryzen 9000 X3D processors - and surely that won't be a good outcome for Team Blue.

Read more: AMD's APUs rumored to be sticking with RDNA 3+ integrated GPUs until 2027 - at least