I am sorry, this is not specifically about Zen 5, but AMD literally did this just a few years ago. Apple did it with the M1 vs both x86 and ARM. Why is it so hard to believe? Because Intel isn't doing it? Intel has been stuck and spinning their wheels to get anywhere. Don't get me wrong, they ARE working on some stuff, but they were far too reliant on node improvements and that absolutely kicked them in the rear end.
Qualcomm, AMD, and Apple have dropped or are dropping chips between this year and next year that are going to bring large improvements to the table. It doesn't happen every year, yes, but it happens frequently. Graviton, for example.
I made a very specific claim. No-one in the x86 market has in the last 20 years done anything close to ~40% IPC gain in a single generation, especially
from an already cut throat competitive staring point (zen 4). Let's tackle your claims one-by-one:
- Zen 1 doesn't really count as Bulldozer was terrible (Unlike Zen 4). It was an insane leap, but still only about matched Skylake in IPC (in integer at least) while still clocking lower.
- Core 2 Duo doesn't count as while it beat P4 soundly, it was nowhere near 40% uplift from it's mobile predecessor (Yonah)
I never mentioned ARM but since you brought it up:
- M1 was rad, but nowhere near 40% from A13 and while it offered insane IPC gains vs Comet Lake and even Tiger Lake (50%+), it also clocked about as much lower. It was incredible as far as efficiency goes but not all-out performance. Don't get me wrong, it was a huge achievement, but a very iterative stride not "one big jump":
- Graviton 1 was a very uncompetitive starting point for G2. I guess G3 is actually pretty close to 40%, but that's still multiple ARM generations A-76 (N1) -> A-77 -> V-1 (enlarged A-78) .
- Qualcomm's Snapdragon X is an insane IPC uplift indeed but it's from a Coretex A78 (which already has 3 succeeding cores A710, A715, A720) and isn't really beating the competition in absolut 1T performance.
Look, I'm all for Zen 5 to be great, in fact I'm really rooting for it (just keeping healthy skepticism until there is at least some proof thrown to the plebs like us) , but if the rumors are true, it really is an unprecedented achievement in a looooong time.
Even if it's "just" ~40% total ST uplift (with those rumored 6 GHz Clocks) instead of ~40% IPC, it will outperform
everything out there in raw 1T performance. M1 didn't do that, Snapdragon X certainly won't do that. I guess
Core 2 Extreme was the last time something similar happened in workloads like SPEC (but half of that was a Zen 4 level clock-speed uplift rom Yonah, not IPC).
LATE EDIT: spell check