AMD revealed its Ryzen 7000 series processors on August 29 during its first “live” product announcement since the Covid-19 pandemic, bringing it to parity with Intel on key technology.
The Ryzen 9 7950X, Ryzen 9 7900X, Ryzen 7 7700X, and Ryzen 5 7600X will employ the new Zen 4 architecture, bringing DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 capabilities to AMD CPUs around a year after Intel Alder Lake. This requires a new motherboard chipset, AMD AM5, just like Intel Alder Lake.
The Ryzen 9 7950X will cost $699 (about £599 / AU$999), the Ryzen 9 7900X $549 (about £469 / AU$799), the Ryzen 7 7700X $399 (about £339 / AU$579), and the Ryzen 5 7600X $299 (about £259 / AU$429). The 7900X and 7600X cost the same as before. Ryzen 9 7950X will be cheaper than Ryzen 9 5950X, which is ideal for gamers.
The Ryzen 7 7700X is priced between the Ryzen 7 5800X ($449) and the Ryzen 7 5700G ($359)
Increasing performance
Dr. Su also claimed that Ryzen 7000-series instructions-per-clock (IPC) have grown throughout all workloads, with some of the best performance benefits coming from gaming and content creation applications, while pushing the boost clock to new heights, especially with its enthusiast processors.
“As we tune the product for production, we observe 13% greater IPC in desktop apps,” Dr. Su added. “We’ve upped the top-stack frequency to 5.7GHz, 800 MHz higher than Ryzen 5000s.”
“Ryzen 7000’s single-threaded performance is 29% higher than Ryzen 5000. I’m proud with the team’s performance gains.”
AMD’s most expected (and impressive) assertion came when comparing the Ryzen 7000 launch lineup to the Intel Core i9-12900K.
According to AMD, the Ryzen 5 7600X is around 5% faster than the i9-12900K in 1080p gaming, with higher powerful CPUs likely doing much better. In Geekbench 5’s single-threaded performance, the Ryzen 9 7950X scores 2,275 vs the i9-12900K’s 2,040.
If accurate, it would be a coup for AMD as Intel prepares to launch Raptor Lake later this year.
More value and efficiency? Thanks
AMD said in their presentation that 5nm devices have increased processing efficiency.
I recently stated that chip makers’ performance arms race was harmful for customers and the environment, and I hope AMD listened. First, it raises the cost of these processors, and given the current cost-of-living problem in the UK and Europe over energy prices and the broader global inflationary climate, no one wants prices to rise more.
Thankfully, AMD is keeping pricing in check (these are still costly chips), but it’s good that they’ve stayed flat or even dropped.
AMD touted its energy efficiency benefits with this chip generation, thanks to the 5nm technology. AMD claims you can obtain the same performance from a Zen 4 processor for 62% of the power of a Ryzen 5000-series chip, or a jump of nearly 50% for the same power.
This is no little deal, having used Ryzen 5000-series CPUs extensively. You can minimise power usage without sacrificing performance. This is the AMD claim I most want to be true.
What’s next for smart ray tracing?
Ryzen Zen 4 processors will include the AVX-512 instruction set. Machine learning and ray tracing require them.
Following AMD’s launch announcement, I asked AMD CVP and GM for desktop PCs, David McAfee, if ray-trace-accelerating instructions will enable cross-processor synergy between Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs.
Papermaster wouldn’t tell if AMD is preparing this kind of technology for the future, but AMD may do it.
This wouldn’t be a trivial modification to AMD’s ray-tracing capacity. Radeon GPUs still lag behind Nvidia in ray tracing due to their first-gen ray accelerators, however RDNA 3’s ray accelerators should be much better.
Having a GPU and a full-blown processor running AVX-512 instructions for high-performance computation – the kind of workloads done by Nvidia’s tensor cores, which make RTX cards the best for creative content and machine learning – could be a big advantage for AMD’s next-generation ray accelerators. Nvidia can’t recreate it.