AMD’s Ryzen 7000 Series Takes Gaming and Content Creation to New Heights with Zen 4

AMD has been teasing the new Ryzen 7000 series and the AM5 platform for a few months and has already given us some glimpses of what to expect. But with those things, you’re still waiting for launch to get the final numbers, and AMD is making some seriously impressive claims for the Ryzen 7000 series, based on the company’s latest Zen 4 architecture built on TSMC’s 5nm process node. The AMD Ryzen 7000 series comes with the new AM5 socket, which includes PCIe 5.0 and DDR5, which Intel has already launched on its 12^e Gen processor family. With AMD’s launch of the Ryzen 7000 series, we’re starting to see exactly how the competition might stack up and what a healthy competition cycle looks like.

Ryzen 7950X – The new flagship

Right off the bat, AMD leads with its flagship processor, the Ryzen 9 7950X, replacing its Ryzen 5950X, a 16-core processor. Compared to the Ryzen 5000 series, AMD claims an average 13% increase in IPC as well as an increase in maximum frequency up to 800 MHz to 5.7 GHz, which translates into a total performance gain by 29% on a single thread, which is considerable for any generation of processors, let alone the 4^e generation of AMD’s Zen architecture. The 7950X also has 80MB of combined L2 and L3 cache and a TDP of 170W. in creator workloads from 32% to 48%.

AMD used the example of Chaos Group’s V-Ray with the 7950X scoring 30,168 points while Intel’s 12900K only scores 18,646, showing a 57% improvement. Equally impressive, my friend Rob Williams at Techgage had the V-Ray benchmark similarly scoring for AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, which has two generations but also twice as many cores, which is amazing in itself. This is even more amazing when you consider that the TDP of the 7950X is 170W while the TR-3970X is a 280W part. This is truly a testament to AMD’s focus not only on peak performance, but also on energy efficiency and performance per watt. In fact, compared to the 12900K, AMD claims to be 57% more capable and 47% more energy efficient. It’s also worth noting that AMD still uses TDP while Intel doesn’t, and we might see the power discussion continue to be discussed.

Programming

AMD’s full lineup this time includes four processors, with the Ryzen 9 7950X leading the way, followed by the Ryzen 7900X, 7700X, and 7600X, clocked at 5.7, 5.6, 5.4, and 5.3 respectively. Since AMD still uses TDP as a measure of power, it claims the 7950X and 7900X as 170W parts while the 7700X and 7600X are rated as 105W even though the power fluctuates above and below those figures. Core counts are exactly where you’d expect them to be at 16, 12, 8, and 6 cores across the board.

AMD didn’t shy away from talking about the Ryzen 5 7600X, especially when it compared its F1 2022 performance to Intel’s top-end 12900K and claimed 11% better performance than Intel’s chip. AMD also claimed 5% faster overall gaming performance on average at 1080P which is much more CPU dependent than higher resolutions and impressed many in the audience considering the 7600X is at the bottom end of the spectrum. AMD’s enthusiast line and has half the CPU cores of Intel. Since so many games are still single-threaded, I guess that’s only the case in gaming, not in content creation.

Zen 4 design

AMD CTO Mark Papermaster also digs deeper into the Zen 4 design and how it achieved the 13% CPI boost and AVX-512 implementation for speedup. the AI. AMD took the geographic average of 22 different desktop workloads and compared them to Zen 3 to get a 13% increase in IPC, and Mark Papermaster said a lot of that increase came from the new front end. and increased cache. He also talked about AI and HPC acceleration with AVX-512, although I’m not quite sure if that’s as relevant for desktop gaming users as it is for data center users and workstations on other platforms.

AMD’s CTO Mark Papermaster also talked about the technological benefits of using 5nm and how its Zen 4-based 7950X has vastly improved over the previous generation to the tune of 74% at 65W TDP, 37% at 105W TDP and 35% at 170W TDP. . This bodes exceptionally well for AMD’s upcoming Zen 4-based laptop parts, which we can probably expect to see around CES time if the company’s usual cadence is to be believed. Mark also drew comparisons to Intel’s Alder Lake performance cores in terms of area and power efficiency, claiming 50% less area and 47% more power efficiency, as AMD only has only one type of core in its processors. In contrast, Intel has both performance and efficiency cores. I also found AMD’s claims of 62% less power at the same performance and 49% more performance at the same power compared to the Ryzen 5000 series astonishing, but of course those are best case scenarios .

The AM5 platform

Dave McAfee, CVP and General Manager of AMD’s Desktop PC business, also spoke about the platform and how AM5 will advance the capabilities of the entire system. AMD’s AM5 will feature a new LGA 1718 socket with up to 230W of power delivery, allowing for bigger and better overclocking and maybe even some headroom for faster chips down the road. AM5 also brings DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 to the platform and will have support from AMD until 2025, which the company currently claims as the socket’s lifetime of over 3 years. AMD is releasing four different socket AM5 chipsets with the X670, X670 Extreme, B650, and B650 Extreme, with the Extreme variants being the chipsets supporting PCIe 5.0 on graphics and storage. Speaking of storage, AMD is building a PCIe 5.0 storage ecosystem that will have drives available from November 2022 and hopefully can take advantage of Microsoft’s DirectStorage as well. AMD’s David McAfee also introduced a new memory overclocking technology called AMD EXPO, designed by AMD to provide one-click memory overclocking to the AMD platform. AMD claims it will improve gaming performance by up to 11% and reduce latency to 63 ns while being license and royalty free. AMD says there will be 15 kits at launch with speeds up to 6400 MT/s from all major memory manufacturers.

Price and availability

AMD CEO Lisa Su happily summed up all the developments with the Ryzen 7000 series and the AM5 platform, but also talked about the pricing and availability of AMD processors. All of AMD’s new Ryzen 7000 series will be available starting September 27^e, with the Ryzen 5 7600X starting at $299, which is $100 more than the 5600X but consistent with what the 5600X sold for at launch. The Ryzen 7950X will top out at $699, which is $100 less than the 5950X sold at launch and $150 more than what it currently sells for now, which is to be expected as it nears the end of its release cycle. life. In addition to these processors, motherboards based on the X670 chipset will be available in September, while boards based on the B650 will be available later in October.

Final Thoughts

AMD seems to have debunked the saying that lightning never strikes the same place twice, as the Ryzen 7000 series offers many incredible improvements in performance power. This will undoubtedly be a huge challenge for its competitors, namely Intel. Still, I’m always a fan of healthy competition, and it seems the Ryzen 7000 series is a perfect example of what healthy competition can do for the industry. Additionally, Zen 4 showed that AMD continues to innovate on design and improve not only IPC but frequency in ways that would have been unimaginable years ago. I know I’m very excited to assess AMD’s claims with my own review and hope to notice for myself the claims of massive performance improvements it makes with the Ryzen 7000 series.

Note: Moor Insights & Strategy writers and editors may have contributed to this article.

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Patrick Moorhead, Founder, CEO and Chief Analyst of Moor Insights & Strategy, is an investor in dMY Technology Group Inc. VI, Dreamium Labs, Groq, Luminar Technologies, MemryX and Movand