AMD Zen ES CPU Benchmarks Look Promising

After what has seemed like years out in the wilderness, AMD is finally getting back to the CPU game with force. Teased multiple times over the past weeks, the new Zen CPU architecture is set to offer a massive improvement over current offerings. While Engineering Sample chips have been floating around, it’s just now that we’re getting our first leaked benchmarks and a hint at the impressive performance to come.

Today, the leaked benchmarks come from the Ashes of the Singularity built in test. As with all leaks, take all of the following information with a grain of salt. Based off of the 1D2801A2M88E4_32/28_N product number, we’re looking at a 8 core, 16 thread,  Zen CPU running at 2.8 GHz stock and 3.2 GHz boost. Not surprisingly, the chip manages to do quite well, scoring about 58 FPS with the RX 480.

Compared to other CPUs also running the RX 480, Zen paints a clear picture of the progress AMD has made. Against the FX 8350, Zen soundly trumps that chip and even edges out the i5 4670k. While i7 4790 still wins out, the i7 4770 might only reach parity. Of course, the astute among you would have noticed that we’re comparing an 8C/16T CPU against a 4C/8T Intel chip. However, AOTS doesn’t scale well if at all beyond 6 cores. Once you consider the clock speeds, it looks like AMD might have a shot at matching Haswell IPC.

More importantly, Zen is a real and massive improvement over the current FX lineup. It looks like the 40%+ IPC gains AMD has been talking about have not been exaggerated. If the clock speeds improve with the final release and there is no reason to think they won’t, we may be looking at highly competitive AMD in the CPU market once again. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait too long for that.