Some of that gap may come from configuration rather than architecture. The EPYC 9996 packs 1GB of L3 cache across eight "Monarch" CCDs and a 1024-bit memory bus, while the Ryzen 7 9700X has 32MB of L3 and ordinary DDR5. The browser test, which is sensitive to memory latency, could easily be flattered by the server chip's enormous cache. But the compression, encoding and editing gains are harder to dismiss as setup mismatch.

Notably, Geekbench makes relatively light use of SIMD instructions, and this test is marked AVX2, so it is not exercising the AVX-512 units in either CPU. Most of the tests instead measure integer arithmetic and memory subsystem performance, which makes Zen 6's lead here more interesting than a raw number-crunching result.

Caveats remain. The widely reported "15% IPC increase" figure is not established, and the EPYC 9996 uses Zen 6c, AMD's dense, area-efficient core design that trades peak clock headroom for packing density, so it is not the core desktop buyers will get. Still, after Zen 5's modest gains over Zen 4, an early sign of a real architectural jump, with rumours of a large clock uplift on top, is promising for Zen 6's desktop debut.