Conclusion
In summary, a lot of this information was already known from the Computex 2024 announcement, in regards to products that will be available. However, the information in regards to the Zen 5 architecture and RDNA 3.5 architecture ahead of the launch was welcomed. It is important to understand the fact that Zen 5 does have architectural changes and improvements compared to Zen 4, and that translates to IPC improvement. However, IPC is not performance, and the real-world performance gains will vary depending on the application and game in how it compares to the previous generation.
While the extra bit of first-party benchmarks from AMD was welcomed, it will be important for third-party reviewers to get this hardware in, review it, test it in many configurations, and see how it actually turns out. Remember, read and watch several reviews, take in all the data from various sources, and come to your own conclusions.
In addition, one focus I want to make is the improvement in performance and power with efficiency gains of the Ryzen 9000 over the Ryzen 7000. For example, the Ryzen 9 9900X has a lower TDP of 120W compared to the Ryzen 9 7900X which was at 170W TDP, yet the Ryzen 9 9900X is supposed to be faster in performance. In addition, the Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X will have a 65W TDP compared to the previous generation at 105W and yet they are supposed to be faster as well. This is impressive, and exactly what we want to see in a generational improvement, lower power, and higher performance. Moore’s Law, is in fact, not dead.
We were also excited to finally see some real information on the improvements in RDNA 3.5 architecture over RDNA 3. In a nutshell, AMD has doubled operations in the shades for textures, interpolation, and other ops plus improved memory access efficiency.
Overall, we cannot wait to get our hands on the Ryzen 9000 series desktop CPUs and see how it all lines up in the real world. It looks like AMD has nailed the power efficiency and performance, now let’s see if AMD can nail the pricing.