2 years sounds very fast. It seems to be because the 3d cache SKUs of each generation were released at different stages. The Zen 3 one was a later variant.

First zen 3 November 5, 2020 with desktop processors. First desktop Ryzen 9000 processors on August 8, 2024. So the generations were about 4 years apart.

Am I missing something? Max boost went up by only 15% but the base frequency went up 38%

Better thermals maybe? Less throttling?

It would have been funny if the "how" had been dropped to end with "Did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?"

I suspect the improvements are even more dramatic going from Zen 1 through to Zen 5. AMD has really hit the jackpot with how scalable the Ryzen CPU is considering how they're able to improve the performance from year to year. This is a stark difference to the FX series during the 2010s, which saw very small YoY performance increases by comparison. Ryzen really is AMD's equivalent to what Nehalem/Core was for Intel back in the mid 2000s.

They never shipped the zen 5 epyc big cache chip (e.g. 9685X). :( I'd hoped they pulled it to produce a HBM integrated chip instead, but they didn't do that either.

2022 to 2024

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