Tenstorrent hosted their "Nerds Talking to Nerds About RISC-V" event this week in India where a dozen high profile industry experts hosted technical talks and panels about every facet of the RISC-V landscape and future. Among these are some familiar names to anyone who's been keeping up on the CPU industry; Raja Koduri of his own AI Generative Gaming startup company, Lars Bergstrom of Google, Naveed Sherwani of Rapid Silicon, and of course Jim Keller the CEO of Tenstorrent itself. On the first day of the event a mere 42 minutes into the YouTube live stream during his keynote talk, Jim Keller is providing an overview of Tenstorrent's latest silicon design goals. He presents a slide showing a wide comparison of various competitor's integer performance in SPEC CPU 2017 INT wherein a raw performance value for AMD's yet released "Zen 5" is listed, as well as the operating frequency and TDP of the supposed sample.

The slide shows all of AMD's recent architectures starting with the original "Zen" (Naples) and the improvements each successive generation has made. Also shown is one of Intel's latest "Sapphire Rapids" Xeons, a projected performance point of NVIDIA's in-house CPU architecture "Grace", Amazon's "Graviton" series with a projected result for "Graviton 3," and Tenstorrent's own 8-wide RISC-V architecture as it currently performs in their labs. While all of these are fascinating results in their own right, we're going to narrow in on the "Zen 4" (Genoa) and "Zen 5" results. We can see from the Frequency and TDP charts that "Zen 4" is clocked at 3.8 GHz as it's equal to the Xeon Platinum 8480+ (which itself boosts to 3.8 GHz in light threaded workloads such as this) so is therefore likely a variant of EPYC 9354 or 9454 with its TDP configured at the minimum 240 W. The unnamed "Zen 5" CPU is shown to be running at around 4.0 GHz with the same 240 W TDP, a tiny 5% bump in core clock, while delivering a substantial 30% jump in performance. The most interesting detail here is that nowhere is it listed—as with "Grace" and "Graviton 3"—that this is a projected result.Industry leaks are nothing new, and usually you're safe to be suspect of the source and brush them off with a pinch of salt and a shrug. However if you'll recall Jim Keller had a not-insignificant role to play in delivering AMD's "Zen" architecture, and in previous keynotes he's stated that his efforts extended to laying the ground work for at least "Zen 3". While Keller has not worked for AMD in quite a few years, there exists a higher level of credibility when information such as this originates with somebody such as he. There is no doubt AMD has working "Zen 5" processors in testing, and rumors have it that they may be pushing for commercial availability before the end of the year. So the question becomes whether Tenstorrent was given access to preliminary results of these new chips, or if the information is purely speculative based on their latent internal knowledge of what's in the pipeline.