In their generational performance review, Golem.de has showcased that the Zen 3 architecture for AMD Ryzen 5000 CPUs achieves a massive 89% performance improvement over the original Zen architecture. A gain of this magnitude has not been seen for over a decade yet it took AMD just four years to offer nearly twice the performance of its first-gen Zen cores.

AMD Zen 3 Does The Impossible, Generational Performance Results Show Nearly Twice The Performance of The Original Zen Core In Gaming & Apps

Back before Zen came to market, the industry was accustomed to the 5-10% gen-over-gen gains that Intel was delivering. Sandy Bridge being the last major performance jump from Intel while Haswell and Skylake pushed the envelope further but not in a disruptive way like Zen has done. Putting aside Zen+ which was more of an efficiency-focused architecture, each Zen core delivered an impeccable gain in IPC.

The first Zen core delivered a 52% IPC jump over Excavator, Zen 2 delivered another 13% IPC bump over Zen 1 while Zen 3 pushed the bar even higher with a 19% IPC bump over Zen 2. Zen+ offered a more conservative 3% IPC gain but as we said, it was more focused on optimizing Zen for efficiency & those improvements are now seen across the board on Zen 2 and Zen 3 chips.

So coming to the test results which Golem achieved, their test platform included all four Ryzen CPU generations. The 8 core and 16 thread SKUs were used which include AMD's Ryzen 7 1800X, Ryzen 7 2700X, Ryzen 7 3800X, and the Ryzen 7 5800X. Each CPU was tested on its own respective board platform that offered the best support so that would be X570 & X470.

AMD Ryzen Generational CPU Specs: