Leaked 256-core Zen 6c EPYC CPU destroys Zen 5 in early single-threaded benchmarks hints at 24% IPC gain

AMD's Zen 6 processors are out! Well, the EPYC 9006 family of server CPUs is out, anyway. These aren't chips that mere mortals like you and I can reasonably acquire, so there aren't really many third-party benchmarks out there yet, but somebody ran GeekBench 7 on one, and you know what that means: time for some wild speculation, such as the supposed 15% single-threaded IPC increase you might have seen reported this week. However, it isn't quite that clear yet. Well-known enthusiast and occasional leaker HXL (@9550pro) spotted the EPYC 9996 result, and now Russian enthusiast "three twenty six" (@326powah) has done a direct comparison with his Ryzen 7 9700X at the same clock.

Let's lay out the details: the AMD EPYC 9996 is an absolutely gargantuan server processor with 256 "Zen 6c" cores spread across eight "Monarch" CCDs with 32 cores apiece. …