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How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?lemire.me

AMD’s Ryzen 7 desktop CPUs (Zen 3 → Zen 5) gained ~50 % performance in two years by widening the core (dispatch width 6→8, integer ALUs 4→6, reorder buffer 256→448), expanding caches (L2 512 KB→1 MB, L1 data 32 KB→48 KB), and doubling SIMD width (four 256‑bit units → four 512‑bit units). Clock speeds rose only 15 % (4.5 GHz→5.2 GHz). Transistor count grew ~50 % (≈11 B→16 B), mostly in the cores.