It looks as though Zen 5 CPUs are already appearing in the wild, and a new AMD Ryzen 5 9600X engineering sample has reportedly just been put through its paces in a couple of benchmarks, including CPU-Z and AIDA64. The results appear to back up claims made by AMD when it first announced the new Ryzen 9000 series at Computex, as well as revealing some of the specs.
The new CPUs are scheduled to be released in July 2024, with Ryzen 9000 X3D CPUs reportedly coming a few months later, and we’re expecting them to make a big splash on our best gaming CPU guide when they’re finally unleashed. In this case, a six-core Granite Ridge AMD Ryzen CPU is shown in comparison to a Ryzen 5 7600X, showing a near doubling of the cache performance.
The screenshots come courtesy of regular tech leaker HXL, who posted some screenshots of the new CPU, which is claimed to be a Ryzen 5 9600X, reportedly running CPU-Z and AIDA64 on X (formerly Twitter). CPU-Z detects the chip as having six cores and 12 threads, with a clock speed of 5GHz (5,037MHz). Comparatively, the Ryzen 5 7600X boosts to up to 5.3GHz, but bear in mind that the new chip is just an engineering sample, and the final CPU may well boost higher when it’s released.
What’s really interesting about the screenshots, however, is the AIDA64 benchmark, which shows a big jump in the read and write performance of the level 1 (L1) and level 2 (L2) cache. These are small amounts of very high-speed memory that sit very close to the CPU cores, and faster cache usually means faster performance. The L1 cache reads at 3,756.4GB/s and writes at 1,884.4GB/s on the new chip, compared with just 2,029.6GB/s and 1,026.9GB/s respectively on the 7600X.
Likewise, the L2 cache reads and writes at 1,874.3GB/s and 1,795.1GB/s on the 9600X, compared with 1,028.5GB/s and 1,017GB/s on the 7600X. It’s not quite the doubling of bandwidth that AMD promised in the Zen 5 reveal at Computex, but it’s not far off. CPU-Z also reveals the amount of cache in the new chip, with 384KB total L1 cache, 6MB total L2 cache (1MB per core), and a shared 32MB pool of L3 cache.
Meanwhile, the internal CPU-Z benchmark shows the Ryzen 5 9600X producing a multi-threaded score of 6,201.3 and a single-threaded score of 775.9. These results are a little higher than the respective 5,944 and 746 figures you can expect from the Ryzen 5 7600X, but the purported 9600X is also an engineering sample, so it’s quite possible there could be a larger performance gap when the final chips are released.
As always with rumor stories, none of the above has been officially confirmed by AMD (and our image above is just a mockup, not a real photo), so don’t take it as the gospel truth yet. AMD first officially unveiled its new Zen 5 CPUs at the Computex tradeshow, and you can read all about what we saw for ourselves on the show floor in our Computex news hub.