Leaked AMD Zen Benchmark Matches Intel 10 Core Xeon

One of the most exciting hardware launches is set to happen early next year. After spending years behind in the CPU market behind Intel, AMD is set to unveil their new Zen architecture and chips in early 2017. As part of the run-up to the launch, there have been several leaks out already in regards to performance. In a new leak, we now have a Blender result which puts a Zen Engineering Sample on par with the Intel Xeon E5 2680 v2, an Ivy Bridge-E 10 core 20 thread CPU.

So far, the leaks we’ve gotten have pointed to Zen clocking about 3.6 Ghz max for their ES chips. If this is the 8 core variant, this means AMD has managed to pass Ivy Bridge in terms of IPC. This is somewhat expected as AMD previously showed an 8 core 16 thread Zen chip in Blender beating out an 8 core 16 thread Broadwell-E chip at the same clock speed. This new leak adds extra credence to AMD’s claims about 40% IPC uplift compared to Excavator.

If AMD is able to surpass Broadwell-E in terms of general x86 performance, they will have a real winner on their hands. Kaby Lake is not expected to improve IPC compared to Skylake and Skylake itself is only a tad ahead of Broadwell. Having Zen match Skylake would be a major comeback for the beleaguered company and finally bring much-needed competition to the performance CPU market.