Comment by adrian_b

It should be noted that Intel Skymont has the same area and it should also have the same performance for any backend-limited application with Arm Cortex-X4 (a.k.a. Neoverse V3) (both use 1.7 square mm in the "3 nm" TSMC fabrication process, while a Zen 5 compact might have an almost double area in the less dense "4 nm" process, with full vector pipelines, and a 3 square mm area with reduced vector pipelines, in the same less dense process).

Arm Cortex-X4 has the best performance per area of among the cores designed by Arm. Cortex-X925 has a double area in comparison with Cortex-X4, which results in a much lower performance per area. Cortex-A725 is smaller in area, but the area ratio is likely to be smaller than the performance ratio (for most kinds of execution units Cortex-X4 has a double number, while for some it has only a 50% or a 33% advantage), so it is likely that the performance per area of Cortex-A725 is worse than for Cortex-X4 and for Skymont.

For any programs that benefit from vector instructions, Zen 5 compact will have a much better performance per area than Intel Skymont and Arm Cortex-X4.

For programs that execute mostly irregular integer and pointer operations, there are chances for Intel Skymont and Arm Cortex-X4 to achieve better performance per area, but this is uncertain.

Intel Skymont and Arm Cortex-X4 have a greater number of integer/pointer execution units per area than Zen 5 compact, even if Zen 5 compact were made with a TSMC process equally dense, which is not the case today.

Despite that, the execution units of Zen 5 compact will be busy a much higher percentage of the time, for several reasons. Zen 5 is better balanced, it has more resources for ensuring out-of-order and multithreaded execution, it has better cache memories. All these factors result in a higher IPC for Zen 5.

It is not clear whether the better IPC of Zen 5 is enough to compensate its greater area, when performing only irregular integer and pointer operations. Most likely is that in such cases Intel Skymont and Arm Cortex-X4 remain with a small advantage in performance per area, i.e. in performance per dollar, because the advantage in IPC of Zen 5 (when using SMT) may be in the range of 10% to 50%, while the advantage in area of Intel Skymont and Arm Cortex-X4 might be somewhere between 50% and 70%, had they been made with the same TSMC process.

On the other hand, for any program that can be accelerated with vector instructions, Zen 5 compact will crush in performance per area (i.e. in performance per dollar) any core designed by Intel or Arm.