Early Zen 5 CPU benchmarks support AMD's IPC claims — Ryzen AI 9 365 shows 15% improvement over the previous gen

AMD is slated to release its next-gen Zen 5 processors soon, with the Ryzen AI 300 and Ryzen 9000 rumored to arrive on July 15 and 31 . However, some tech enthusiasts are excited about these new chips, especially as they’re the first in the Zen 5 family. Hardware tester David Huang got his hands on an engineering sample of the Ryzen AI 9 365, so he ran some quick benchmarks on the device and shared the results on his blog .

The platform he tested had 32 GB of LPDDR5x-7500 RAM, but he didn’t provide more information. Huang highlighted that the device is an engineering sample with early firmware, so the retail product’s performance could vary. Take the results with a pinch of salt.

Huang compared the Zen 5 chip’s performance with the previous generation Ryzen 7 7735U and Ryzen 7 7840U AMD chips. It consistently performed better in both Geekbench 5 and Geekbench 6 multi-core benchmarks, delivering 151.81% and 167.64% relative performance compared to the Ryzen 7 7735U. He also tested the chip using single-core benchmarks, and its Zen 5 and more efficient Zen 5c cores both showed a 15% minimum instructions per cycle uplift compared to the last-generation Ryzern 7 7735U.

These numbers align with the 16% IPC improvement AMD claimed for its Granite Ridge desktop processors. However, they’re slightly lower than the 20% higher CPU performance AMD claims for the Ryzen AI 300-series, but these tests do not include integrated GPU and NPU tests.

The performance improvement on the Zen 5 mobile chips might seem modest, but what makes it different from AMD’s last-generation processors is the use of a more powerful NPU that can hit up to 50 TOPS. While the Ryzen AI 300 PCs won’t come with Copilot+ features when it launches, it will eventually get them via a Windows Update later this year. Furthermore, apps that support on-device AI processing from AMD could already take advantage of the chip’s NPU.

These tests are from an engineering sample, so nothing is set in stone yet. Nevertheless, they are an indication of what we could expect from AMD’s next-generation processors, and we’d love to see how they’d perform in the real world. This is especially true as Microsoft and Qualcomm have just launched their Snapdragon X-powered Copilot+ PCs; we can’t wait to get our hands on both next-gen chips and run them head-to-head against each other.