

To your point of how far new zen cores have come, I have a fun story from work. In short, in my specific use case, my 7840HS (8 zen4 laptop cores) was at parity or outperforming a 1950X (16 zen1 desktop cores), in a fully multithreaded task. The workload was essentially a bunch of RISC-V simulators running independently in parallel through a makefile, so the individual tasks benefit greatly from increased IPC. I’m not sure the entire gain in performance comes from IPC, but it’s probably the majority and that is still very impressive.
Those laptop cores are kerbstomping the zen1 cores according to these benchmarks. Double the performance for single-core geekbench, which matches what I observed as well.