An AMD Zen 5 CPU Breaks Cover With A Radeon RX 7900 Riding Shotgun But Is It Real?

708px ryzen processor
An engineering sample of a Ryzen 8000 Zen 5 CPU was supposedly seen in the wild according to a listing from Einstein@Home. According to @Benchleaks who Tweeted about the post, the CPU could potentially be a Zen 5 chip, due to the unique number ID that the engineering sample possesses. However, it is impossible to confirm whether or not this is a real Zen 5 chip, so take it with a grain of salt.

The Einstein@Home listing shows the full spec sheet of an anonymously owned computer featuring an AMD engineering sample. The description of the sample starts with a long string of numbers followed by this nomenclature “Family 26 Model 64 Stepping 0”. According to BenchLeaks, the “Family 26” nomenclature specifically highlights the potential of this being a Zen 5 CPU, since previous numbers (such as 25) were used for previous Zen architectures.

The listing also highlighted a few of the chip’s core specifications, including the existence of 16 cores on the chip, and a memory cache of 1024KB. Other system specs shown include 31.22GB of usable memory and the use of a Radeon RX 7900 GPU — which could be a typo for an RX 7900 XT or it could be a new SKU altogether.

Sadly, we cannot say if this family number is explicitly used for Zen 5 CPUs alone, however, if this is a Zen 5 CPU it confirms that AMD is well into its Zen 5 development cycle and is already producing functional Zen 5 CPUs.

Not much is known about Zen 5’s architectural improvements, but according to rumors, it will be a “huge microarchitectural revamp” over Ryzen 7000, with a jump to TSMC’s 3nm node and a massive architectural change adding efficiency cores to Zen 5 CPUs in a similar manner to Intel’s Alder and Raptor Lake architectures. TSMC’s 3nm manufacturing process alone will be 70% denser than previous designs, allowing AMD to make Ryzen 8000 chips on this new process 15% faster or 30% more power efficient.

As a result, Ryzen 8000 chips could have a monstrous performance uplift over current Ryzen 7000 CPUs, due to these two factors alone. The addition of efficiency cores particularly should increase multi-core performance substantially, if AMD goes for similar core configurations compared to Intel.

Incidentally, AMD also released a new Ryzen 8000 roadmap just a few days ago, giving us some more details about its Zen 5 CPU. Some of these details include the integration of Navi 3.5 GPUs into Ryzen 8000 chips, and that these chips will be available between the 65W and 170W power bands similar to most Ryzen 7000 CPUs. Plus, AMD also confirmed that Ryzen 8000 will work on the AM5 platform to no one’s surprise.
Tags:  AMD, CPUs, zen 5, ryzen-8000