Update: It has now been officially confirmed.
Recently, on Weibo, Lenovo China's manager commented on a post that was discussing a rumor about AMD's Zen 5 IPC improvement. According to the rumor, AMD's upcoming Zen 5 series of processors are going to achieve a 40% IPC (instructions per cycle) boost. The rumor alleges AMD is seeing around 40% improvement in SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation), which had recently accused Intel of inflating its benchmark scores, and AMD had no part in doing the blaming.
However, the Lenovo manager responded with some surprise as apparently internal tests are showing a 10% gain. This 10% gain is based on Cinebench R23 single-thread test numbers.
The executive's surprise is hardly surprising though. It is no easy task to achieve 40% IPC improvement in a single generation without a massive architectural overhaul. For example, AMD achieved a 52% jump with first-generation Zen versus fourth-gen Bulldozer (Excavator) but we all know how terrible Bulldozer was.
While there is a slim chance that SPEC may indeed see a 40% boost, 10% does seem more realistic and much more likely across various tasks unless AMD manages to pull a rabbit out of its hat.
Interestingly, the Lenovo manager also revealed that Windows 10 driver support will be ended by AMD with Strix Point APUs. This implies the focus will mostly be on Windows 11 24H2 alone and it also makes sense given that the hype is around NPU and the AI performance of these parts as well as the next-gen Strix Halo, which is rumored to be very powerful.
The Lenovo China manager, with the Weibo user name 思考未来啊 commented (via Wccftech):
哪来的40%，我看到的是Zen5相对Zen4 IPC提升10%，在CR23 1T的测试里提升则大于10%。另外，Win10爱好者请注意，从Strix Point开始，AMD将不提供Win10驱动
Google-translated to English, it reads:
Where did you get the 40%? What I saw was that Zen5 increased by 10% compared with Zen4 IPC, while in the CR23 1T test, the increase was more than 10%. In addition, Win10 enthusiasts please note that starting from Strix Point, AMD will not provide Win10 driver
Ryzen 8050 series or Strix Point mobile APU was first unveiled by AMD last year in December. For those wondering, Ryzen 8040 series is codenamed "Hawk Point." According to the company, Strix Point is "on track" for release in the second half (2H) of this year.
Rather bizarrely, AMD may be looking to update the naming for Strix Point from Ryzen 8050 series to "Ryzen AI HX" at least according to Asus' listed laptop parts (via @harukaze5719 on X/formerly Twitter).
Do keep in mind though that AMD's chipset driver, including the latest one, does support the desktop Ryzen 8000 series which is different from the Ryzen 8050 the article is about.
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