The Intel Lion Cove cores and the AMD Zen 5 cores have much more similar microarchitectures than any previous Intel and AMD pairs of competing CPUs, with the ex

The Intel Lion Cove cores and the AMD Zen 5 cores have much more similar microarchitectures than any previous Intel and AMD pairs of competing CPUs, with the exception of the fact that in the consumer P-cores used in Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake Intel has removed the support for SMT and for AVX-512 (a.k.a. AVX10). I.e. for most operations Lion Cove and Zen 5 have the same number of functional units that can execute them, unlike for earlier competing cores where there were greater differences. The only significant difference between Intel Lion Cove and AMD Zen 5 is that the former has an instruction decoder that can decode 8 instructions simultaneously, while the latter has 2 instruction decoders, each of which can decode 4 instructions simultaneously. Other small differences will matter only in special applications, e.g. it is likely that Lion Cove can compute floating-point divisions faster. Therefore it is expected that at the same clock frequency in single-threaded applications the performance of the Core Ultra 200K series will be almost the same as that of the Ryzen 9000 series, perhaps with a very small advantage for Intel. Because Arrow Lake S is made by TSMC, the top Intel models will no longer have a higher clock frequency than AMD, which will contribute additionally to very similar single-threaded performance. In multi-threaded performance, there will be large differences between the applications that use 512-bit AVX-512 instructions and those which do not use 512-bit AVX-512 instructions. The former will be much faster on Ryzen, while the latter are likely to be faster on Arrow Lake S, because Intel uses a better TSMC process, with higher energy efficiency. The new Skymont E-cores have double AVX throughput in comparison with the E-cores of Meteor Lake/Raptor Lake/Alder Lake, so the contribution of the E-cores to the throughput of multi-threaded AVX applications will be much higher than in the previous Intel hybrid CPUs. For AVX instructions, a 24-core Arrow Lake S CPU will have 3/2 more vector functional units than a 16-core Zen 5, while when using 512-bit AVX-512 instructions a 16-core Zen 5 will have 4/3 more vector functional units than a 24-core Arrow Lake S. So the ISA used for compiling a program will lead to great differences in benchmarks. Compiling for AVX-512 is not enough for Zen 5, 512-bit instructions must also be selected. For the older Intel CPUs with AVX-512 the 512-bit instructions were frequently avoided, because they lowered the clock frequency. On the other hand, on Zen 4 and Zen 5 the 512-bit instructions are always better.