According to performance numbers of an AMD "Summit Ridge" ZEN CPU engineering-sample put out by WCCFTech, AMD's claims of IPC gains are gaining credibility, and showing signs of the gaming PC processor market warming up again. An engineering sample featuring 8 cores and 16 threads (via SMT), beat Intel's Core i5-4670K processor. This sample featured clock speeds of 2.80 GHz, with 3.20 GHz boost.

The "Summit Ridge" sample provided 10 percent higher frame-rates than a Core i5-4670K, in the "Ashes of the Singularity" 1080p benchmark. The chip is still convincingly beaten by 12 percent, by a Core i7-4790 (non-K), running at 3.60 GHz, with 4.00 GHz boost. This shows that AMD could leverage the new 14 nm FinFET process to crank up clock-speeds, and produce SKUs competitive with current Intel "Skylake-D" Core i5 and Core i7 processors.