Conclusion
In the above picture, you can see the CPU boxes, which are now a nice striking dark color, with orange accents. The Ryzen 9 boxes are larger than the Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 boxes. In the second picture is a row of most of the CPUs lined up, they pretty much all look the same, sans labeling.
There is still a lot more to learn, and a lot of questions to ask. Today we had a very high level of information revealed, but there are still a lot of low-level details to learn. We are most curious about AM4 heatsink compatibility, which AMD claims it does support and works, so there is backward compatibility. However, with the new LGA socket and ILM, we are most curious about heatsink pressure points providing even pressure to the CPU as well as the ILM causing CPU bending, which has been an issue with the competition.
We also wonder why AMD never brought up the fact that Zen 4 has integrated graphics in the live stream. Yes, these are mainly only meant to “turn a screen on” and not play games, but you would think this would be a pretty monumental thing to talk about since it is brand new for AMD, and now brings competition to Intel. We hope to learn more about the graphics in our deep dives.
It is clear that AMD is pushing innovation, then again it really had no choice but to provide things like DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 in its new platform considering the competition has it. If AMD had not, or even missed out on one of these things, this platform would have been backwards from the beginning. It is also clear that in this round, AMD focused on core frequency improvements with the Zen 4 architecture. While it is getting a decent gen-to-gen 13% IPC boost, the primary goal and focus was on getting the frequency to ramp up, and ramp up they did. At 5.7GHz AMD has put its effort into providing clock speeds that high on a 16-core chip, and that is impressive. Zen 4 was all about optimizing core speed.
We will be learning more in the coming days, and hope to provide more granular details in our launch review. For now, take all this information, assimilate it, let it mull over, and with the pricing consider AMD is trying to set its pricing relative to the competition, and its gen-over-gen pricing strategy, of which it has a forward-looking plan. AMD plans to support AM5 till at least 2025, and if you are wondering about 3D V-Cache chips, AMD is planning Zen 4 3D V-Cache. And what about Zen 5? AMD states that Zen 5 is on track for 2024. Finally, the icing on the cake, they actually mentioned RDNA3 on 5nm and we had a “sneak peak” of a shroud design, with a game demo running, so yay?
Naked Ryzen 7000 Series CPU, nice silicon you have there.