AMD Zen 6 Medusa Point: the new APU impresses in benchmarks even before having a name

The new AMD processors, code-named Medusa Point, have made a striking appearance on Geekbench, this time truly in grand style. A new benchmark shows results that are significantly higher than previous leaks, suggesting a performance increase beyond initial expectations.

The star of the test is once again the engineering sample identified by the code 100-000001713-33_N, which was seen last July 10, appearing on the AMD Plum-MDS1 platform. The chip features 10 cores and 20 threads, organized into two clusters of four and six cores, and represents one of the first concrete previews of the upcoming Ryzen mobile APUs.

In the new Geekbench run, the processor scored 3,329 points in single-core and 16,555 points in multi-core. This is a noticeable improvement over the previous result of the same sample, which was 3,174 points in single-core and 15,092 points in multi-core. The increase is about +4.9% in the single-core test and +9.7% in the multi-core test, figures that suggest not only a really rapid refinement—just 10 days—but also evidently wide margins for improvement.

The data from the benchmark also show a significant advantage over the current mobile AMD processors based on Zen 5. Compared to the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, Medusa Point is approximately 28% superior in single-core and 24% in multi-core. The gap widens further against the Ryzen AI 9 365, another 10-core APU from the Strix Point family: the new Zen 6 sample logs about a 35% advantage in single-core and 33% in multi-core.

One of the most interesting aspects concerns the operating frequencies. The benchmark reports a peak of about 5.37 GHz, a value that exceeds by approximately 300 MHz the maximum frequencies recorded by the fastest currently available Strix Point APUs. The sample also has 10 MB of L2 cache and 32 MB of L3 cache, a configuration that could significantly contribute to the performance observed in the tests.

AMD has not yet confirmed the final commercial name, the final frequencies, or the consumption limits of the Medusa Point platform. However, rumors indicate that this generation could hit the market as part of the Ryzen 500 series dedicated to notebooks.

It's important to note that Geekbench is not the definitive metric for assessing the real performance of a processor. Rather, these results provide an initial concrete indication of the potential of Zen 6, which could herald a significant generational leap compared to the current Zen 5.