Introduction
We are in Austin, TX today, where AMD is also located, to get schooled on AMD’s next generation of CPUs and in fact platform changes, for the next generation AMD Ryzen 7000 Series CPUs. This is it, the Zen 4 moment we’ve been waiting for, the official live stream announcement has been made, and we were there to experience all of what AMD has to offer with this next generation.
This is the official announcement of the Ryzen 7000 Series CPUs and AM5 platform that is replacing Zen 3 and the AM4 platform, and this announcement gives us some high-level details about what is to come, with official pricing. For the more low-level details, and reviews, you will have to wait, but we won’t, as we dive deeper with the engineers in the days to come and will provide you all the information we can in our review when that goes live, so stay tuned.
AMD started off by showing us how well integrated AMD is currently, and stated that over the next several quarters AMD is going to release 4 new architectures. These are made up of the CPU and GPU spaces. AMD is committed to innovation and emphasizing energy efficiency and performance per Watt in its architectures to come.
The Ryzen 7000 series CPUs and platform are what we all thought, it brings the new AM5 platform, DDR5, and PCIe 5.0 support with Zen 4 being a 5nm node. AMD stated that the new CPU core design is for gaming performance, and compute performance and is based on a platform and architecture that will scale for the future. AMD also stated that it exceeded its design goals for Zen 4.
CPU Stack and Pricing
Instead of boring you with the details (we’ll do that later) let’s jump straight to the pricing and SKU lineup for the Ryzen 7000 series. At the top sits the Ryzen 9 7950X at $699 is the 16-core/32-thread CPU at 170W TDP and boosting to 5.7GHz. Then we have the Ryzen 9 7900X at $549 is the 12-core/24-thread CPU at 170W TDP and boosting to 5.6GHz. Coming down to the Ryzen 7 we have the Ryzen 7 7700X at $399 is the 8-core/16-thread CPU at 105W TDP and boosting to 5.4GHz. Finally, we have the Ryzen 5 7600X at $299 is the 6-core/12-thread CPU at 105W TDP and boosts to 5.3GHz.
You might notice a lack of lower-end SKUs at the moment, AMD claims that it will broaden its portfolio of SKUs early next year. AMD also recognizes that the AM4 platform and AM5 platform will co-exist for a while. So when will we see these particular CPUs hit the shelves? AMD expects worldwide shelf availability on September 27th, 2022.
| MSRP at Launch | Ryzen 5000 Series CPUs | Ryzen 7000 Series CPUs |
|---|---|---|
| Ryzen 9 5950X / Ryzen 9 7950X | $799 | $699 |
| Ryzen 9 5900X / Ryzen 9 7900X | $549 | $549 |
| Ryzen 7 5700X / Ryzen 7 7700X | $299 | $399 |
| Ryzen 5 5600X / Ryzen 5 7600X | $299 | $299 |
Keep in mind the Ryzen 7 5700X SKU is newly released, before it existed the Ryzen 7 5800X at $449 MSRP was the only SKU. The new 7700X is less expensive than the 5800X but more expensive than the 5700X at launch by $100. By the time the 5700X was launched, the 5600X was available for cheaper than MSRP. The interesting, and much-appreciated pricing of the lot is the 7950X lowering in price by $100 compared to the last gen, this was needed to be more competitive with the 12900K.
Overall Improvements
The Ryzen 9 7950X is hands down the best CPU for gamers and creators, AMD claims. This is the highest core frequency boosting CPU AMD has ever made at 5.7GHz. The official IPC uplift that AMD is claiming with Zen 4 over Zen 3 is 13%. The rest of the performance uplift AMD is claiming is coming from the core frequency boost. With the core frequency boost added into the IPC equation, AMD claims a 29% single-threaded performance boost over Zen 3. In the popular V-Ray benchmark the Ryzen 9 7950X scored 30,168 while the competition’s Core i9-12900K scored 18,646, that’s a 62% performance improvement, and that is done with a 47% better energy efficiency.
AMD is emphasizing single-thread performance gains for helping gameplay performance. The Ryzen 7000 series as a whole has a leg up on single-thread performance over the 12900K in Geekbench. However, as we all know, single-thread performance isn’t everything these days in gaming, more and more games do benefit from multi-core performance and other things.
AMD also claims game dominance down the stack, with the Ryzen 7 7600X outperforming the Core i9-12900K in F1 2022 performance at 1080p by 11%.