AMD Strix Point Zen 5 Mobile APU Scores Strong In Blender Benchmark Leak
The latest benchmark leak looks pretty interesting for Zen 5's performance in Blender, at least. Spotted by HXL (@9550Pro on Xwitter), a pair of results for an "AMD Eng Sample: 100-000000994-38_Y" in the OpenData database for the version 4.1.0 Blender Benchmark give a median score of 270.92 in this benchmark. But how do we know that this is a Zen 5 part?
Well, for one thing, AMD probably isn't testing any engineering samples that aren't Zen 5 at this point; Zen 6 is still quite a ways off, and Zen 4 is quite mature by now. But for another thing, we've already seen this processor before—it appeared in a Geekbench result back in April where there was more information about exactly what the processor was: Family 26, Model 32—Strix Point.
This particular chip is known to have twelve CPU cores, although at the time of the Geekbench leak it was configured to run without simultaneous multi-threading. HXL says that the configuration of this processor is "4+8", implying four full-fat Zen 5 cores and eight Zen 5C compact cores. We'd ordinarily expect a twelve-core CPU to smash lower-core-count chips in Blender, but it's important to remember that this is an engineering sample.
As a result, the score isn't that high on the face of it; a median result of 270.92 points places the Strix Point processor just ahead of the Ryzen 7 7700X. That's actually an amazing result, though—not only is this low-power mobile part outpacing a much higher-power desktop CPU, it's doing it in engineering sample form. So saying, it's still quite possible that AMD's Zen 5 processors might be very speedy indeed.
Other things that we expect from Strix Point are 24MB of L3 cache, and an integrated graphics processor based on RDNA 3.5 with up to eight workgroup processors (WGPs), up from six in Phoenix and Hawk Point. AMD is expected to launch these APUs at Computex 2024, and they may be coming with a loathsome AI-focused rebranding effort, which you can read about over here.
