AMD Ryzen 7 processors achieved 50% performance gains over two years (2022–2024) through architectural improvements rather than clock speed increases. The Zen 5 9800X3D doubled transistor count to 16 billion, widening execution pipelines, expanding caches, and doubling SIMD unit widths from 256-bit to 512-bit.
Modern superscalar processors can execute more than one taken branch per cycle under certain conditions, contrary to conventional wisdom. Testing a loop with conditional logic shows that Apple M4 Max and Intel Granite Rapids processors achieve multiple taken branches in less than 2 cycles on average, while AMD Zen 4 struggles more but Zen 5 improves significantly.