AMD Zen 6 architecture shows significant IPC gains in benchmarks

Leaked Geekbench 7 results for the AMD EPYC 9996 flagship processor, featuring the Zen 6c architecture, indicate a substantial increase in Instructions Per Clock (IPC) compared to the previous Zen 5 generation.

The EPYC 9996, which utilizes 256 Zen 6c cores, achieved a single-core score of 2,847 and a multi-core score of 68,427. While its single-core score is lower in absolute terms than the Zen 5-based EPYC 4545P, which scored 3,064, the Zen 5 model operates at a significantly higher clock speed of approximately 5.47 GHz compared to the EPYC 9996's 4.12 GHz. When normalized for clock speed, the Zen 6 architecture demonstrates an IPC improvement of approximately 24% over Zen 5.

Comparisons with the Ryzen 7 9700X also suggest a single-core performance increase of roughly 16.5% for Zen 6 at equivalent clock speeds. The EPYC 9996 features 1.0 GB of L3 cache, 256 MB of L2 cache, and a TDP of 600W, targeting high-density server environments.