It's not hyperbole to say that Zen saved AMD. The fully redesigned CPU architecture, first launched in 2017, swept away all the company's past mistakes and along with chiplets, Infinity Fabric, and 3D V-cache, it paved the way to profitability and market-leading performance. There have been some big steps forward in the chip design since then but with the freshly announced Zen 5 at Computex 2024, AMD isn't doing anything majorly different—just a collection of small changes that combine to give some notable performance boosts, in the right applications.
Let's start with what hasn't changed. Zen 5 is fundamentally the same as Zen 4, with the CCDs (Core Complex Dies) comprising up to eight cores, sharing 32MB of L3 cache. The IOD (Input/Output Die) is practically the same, too, although few details about its feature set have been released so far.
