AMD's upcoming Zen 5 CPU is going to be a beast. So says the CEO of AI chip startup Tenstorrent, who yesterday showed off performance comparison numbers for most of the major CPU architectures, including AMD's yet-to-be-announced Zen 5 chip.

But here's the thing: Tenstorrent's CEO is none other than Jim Keller, who once worked at AMD and led the development of Zen itself. In other words, unless there are official numbers from AMD, this is the best third-party data available. This is not a dubious "leak" from a well-known YouTube channel.

Keller was the keynote speaker at a Tenstorrent talk (opens in new tab) for college students in India, where he described the company's latest RISC-V chips for the future of AI model and computing. Remarkably, Keller pulled out a slide with detailed performance numbers for a variety of data center CPUs, including all existing generations of Zen, Intel's latest Sapphire Rapids chips, Amazon's own CPUs, and Nvidia's upcoming Grace chip: Zen 5. [

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It is immediately worth noting that AMD's Zen-based chips for servers and datacenters are very closely related to CPUs for desktop PCs. So far, chiplets with the actual CPU cores have been shared by both platforms.

In other words, Zen 5 in this context is directly related to the Zen 5 processors that will be included in gaming PCs when AMD announces its next new generation of Ryzen 9000 chips, probably next year.

So how fast exactly is Zen 5, according to Keller and Tenstorrent? Sadly, this is not about in-game frame rates, but SPEC CPU 2017 INT Rate performance.

According to Tenstorrent's figures, Zen 5 is 30% faster than Zen 4. Zen 5 clocks are shown to be slightly higher than Zen 4. Adjusting for clock speed, Zen 5 performs about 23% higher per clock (known as IPC).

Charting previous AMD Zen architectures, the numbers are very consistent with how AMD's Ryzen CPUs scaled up with each generation, including gaming performance. there was little progress from Zen 1 to Zen 2, then to Zen 3 and a big leap forward. Zen 4 was only a slight improvement over Zen 3. Then Zen 5 made another giant leap forward.

These numbers suggest that AMD's next gaming CPU will be a big step forward. Considering how impressive the latest AMD Ryzen 7800X3D (open in new tab) is for gaming, this really says something.

One caveat is that it is unclear on what basis Keller and Tenstorrent are citing these numbers; aside from AMD's Zen 5 and Nvidia's Grace, all of the processors listed are already available.

The chart describes the performance of Nvidia's unannounced Grace CPU as "predicted," but the same caveat does not apply to Zen 5. Almost certainly, AMD is already running Zen 5 chips, and samples may even be available to the industry. But any performance figures would be closely guarded by NDAs and other legal lockdowns.

Of course, if anyone outside of AMD is qualified to speculate on Zen 5 performance, it is Keller. He was the lead architect of AMD's K8 chip, known as the blockbuster Athlon 64.

He later moved to Apple, where he was instrumental in creating a new CPU core design for the iPhone that dominates the smartphone industry to this day, and has recently been applied to Apple's Mac computers in the form of the M1 and M2 family of CPUs, which have proven to be very effective

2012.

In 2012, Keller returned to AMD to oversee the development of the original Zen architecture. It is not entirely clear how many generations of Zen chips were conceived under his leadership, but it would be surprising if he did not at least have a pretty good idea of what to expect from Zen 5.

He was a Zen at AMD before briefly joining Tesla to help the EV company develop its own self-driving chips before moving to Intel in 2018.How much of Intel's recent resurgence with Alder Lake and Raptor Lake is unknown. But there is no doubt that Keller is one of the leading CPU designers of the past two decades.

In other words, if he thinks Zen 5 will be a major step forward, we better believe it.