Zen 6 leaks point to major Ryzen gains

AMD’s upcoming Ryzen processors could deliver substantial multithreaded gains, according to developer 1usmus, who has previously worked closely with AMD. After retracting an initial identification of redacted benchmark results, he separately claimed that a 12 core Zen 6 processor approaches the performance of a current 16 core Ryzen 9 9950X3D2. Combined with reported increases in core counts, those claims suggest potentially near-double multithreaded performance over Zen 5, though that remains a theoretical projection rather than a verified desktop benchmark.

A leaked Geekbench 7 result for an AMD EPYC 9996 server processor offers another indication of architectural progress. An enthusiast compared its Zen 6c performance with a Ryzen 7 9700X locked to 4.1GHz, approximately matching the server chip’s test frequency. The server processor scored roughly 16.5% higher in overall single-threaded performance, with gains over 20% in several workloads. Differences in cache and memory latency complicate conclusions about improvements that could reach consumer processors.

Separately, experimental projects including GPU-Unlock and GPU-Unlock-Ada reportedly bypass Tensor Core restrictions on Nvidia graphics cards. An RTX 4090 increased from 165.6 TFLOPS to 331.6 TFLOPS in an FP16 throughput test. The temporary modifications affect specific AI calculations, not demonstrated gaming performance, and practical gains can be much smaller when memory bandwidth limits workloads. Compatibility varies by card and operating system.