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How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?

https://lemire.me/blog/2026/09/18/how-did-amd-ryzen-get-50-faster-in-two-years/
125•ibobev•4d ago

Comments

kgwgk•4d ago
It would have been funny if the "how" had been dropped to end with "Did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?"
nly•4d ago
Am I missing something? Max boost went up by only 15% but the base frequency went up 38%

Better thermals maybe? Less throttling?

kasabali•4d ago
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.

ProllyInfamous•3d ago
>>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.

qball•3d ago
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.

ChoGGi•3d ago
As ProllyInfamous mentioned; bringing the cores to the top helped reduce heat, which allows them to boost higher for longer periods then the 7800x3d.
kristianp•3d ago
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.

paulkrush•3d ago
2022 to 2024
Yokolos•3d ago
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.
nullc•3d ago
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.
HappySweeney•31m ago
I imagine they didn't want to cannibalize upcoming Zen 6 which will have the 3d cache
tiffanyh•59m ago
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.

a3w•57m ago
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.

creaturemachine•37m ago
I still love my 5800X3D. Drop-in upgrade from a 3700X so I kept my board, RAM, cooler, everything.
jauntywundrkind•48m ago
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.

christkv•46m ago
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
t1234s•39m ago
Is this what's helping drive their stock price to the moon?
epolanski•36m ago
Serious question with 1GB L3 isn't it theoretically possible to boot a full Linux without ram?

Edit: dug in it, no, because cache isn't addressable and it's directly managed by the cpu.

floxy•8m ago
I used to use a full Slackware Linux distribution with X-Windows on a 486 clone with 4 Megabytes of RAM.
stevefan1999•7m ago
Intel has a cache-as-ram (CAR) mode / Non-Eviction Mode, which is what you wanted but it is only available before DRAM is brought up via core initialization. Not sure about AMD.
mcv•33m ago
I'm not sure focusing on just 3 processors is enough to claim that Ryzen got 50% faster. There were already other, faster Ryzen processors available without the additional cache. The extra cache was a very new thing (and very temperature sensitive), so it makes sense that they start carefully and then get a lot of improvement quickly). And the 5800x3d was for an older chipset, with all the limitations that come with that.
monster_truck•24m ago
It's not that temperature sensitive, 90C is plenty. If you can't keep the non-x3d processors underneath that you're just throwing away performance anyways
robotnikman•23m ago
The x86 architecture still going strong. I've always though Ryzen was a fitting name, AMD had Ryzen from the ashes and struck a blow to the long dominant Intel.
whatever1•20m ago
Single core performance still worse than an iPhone.

The x86 folks lost the ball completely. For workstation/ mobile needs you go to arm. For matmul at scale you go to gpus.

I guess windows gaming with separate gpu is the only remaining market for them.

Unless Nvidia releases a motherboard with an arm cpu on top of their RTX cards, and then that market is gone too.

goodpoint•17m ago
By being more expensive?
t43562•15m ago
It's impressive and yet it surely depends what you're doing with it? 50% better performance isn't going to make a local LLM feel quick and yet so many other aspects of computing are quite fast anyhow. I can browse the web fairly comfortably on a Raspberry Pi and it's a bit slow but manageable.

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