- This is a big moment for me.
My career at LMG began with the launch
of the very first Ryzen CPUs in 2017.
Fast forward five and a half years, and the socket
that I cut my teeth on as a tech journalist
is finally at the end of its life cycle.
Using the new AM5 socket, AMD's Ryzen 7000 promises
not only to live up to the legacy they built with Ryzen,
but also to humiliate the competition in the same way
they were in the before times.
And even more surprisingly, they might be bucking
industry trends when it comes to efficiency.
I might not need to buy a new power supply, after all.
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- AMD's first big announcements of the day were all centered
around the Ryzen 9 7950X, the 16-core, 32-thread
beast of a CPU that can boost up to a staggering 5.7 GHz,
making it a massively versatile piece of silicon.
From AMD's benchmarks, which we should take with a grain
of salt, it performs about 15% better, on average,
over the outgoing 5950X in 1080P gaming
and up to a whopping 40% better in content creation.
Compared to Intel's Core i9 12900K, it's either as good
or up to 24% faster, depending on the game,
and as much as 62% faster in content creation.
Now obviously, this depends greatly on the workload,
and AMD brought receipts, by showing the V-Ray renderer
running on both chips.
Now mind you, V-Ray is more geared towards GPU compute,
but this is an illustration of the wider design principles
that AMD put into the new Zen 4 cores.
Built on what AMD calls a specialized N-five process,
developed in close collaboration with TSMC,
the new chips accomplished their performance targets
while actually reducing die area by 18%.
Despite the addition of new features,
including the infamous AVX-512,
that Intel deprecated for Alder Lake.
Instead of using up die area with dedicated space
for this, AMD is using the existing 256-bit structures,
but in a double pumped, or DDR, arrangement,
which they say causes fewer clock speed fluctuations,
as all those transistors are constantly changing state
and crunching on those vast numbers.
But hold up a second, AVX-512 is not for gaming,
and Intel's more or less abandoning it.
So why is AMD embracing it?
Well AMD's claim is that AVX-512 will give Ryzen
a performance boost in deep-learning workloads,
which Intel has dedicated instructions for.
The long and the short of it is that it should
improve performance while having minimal downsides,
and a die that's half the size of the competition.
Though, of course, this is something we'll have
to test for ourselves.
But perhaps the most important consequence
of this shrunken die is power efficiency.
It's no secret that the tech industry has been headed
down the dark path of ever-increasing power draw
for a while now.
And with the announcement that the Ryzen 9 7950X's TDP
would increase by 62%, many in the tech industry
feared that Ryzen 7000 would be another example
of throwing more power at the problem.
Luckily for us, AMD claims that this was done
on the 7950X almost entirely for the extra headroom,
and in operation, the new chips have been substantially
better in performance per watt than Ryzen 5000.
Using the 16-core Ryzen 9s as an example,
the 7950X manages 62% lower power draw
for the same performance or gets 49% more performance
for the same power draw.
Most impressively, at a fixed 65-watt TDP,
that number grows to 74% better performance,
which would mean that rather than
the new chips being insatiably power hungry,
they're, in fact, much more efficient.
I'm not sure that this isn't spin until I see it myself,
but this is extremely exciting for future
efficiency builds, if true.
As for how they've managed it, AMD tells me that it's
a roughly 60-40 split between the physical die-shrink,
along with some tweaks, and the design and all the
lessons learned in the mobile space,
including the all-new 6 nm IO die
with the new integrated graphics processor.
Now they didn't really talk too much
about that new iGPU in the presentation,
but they say that it's not going to be as powerful
as what you might find in an APU, that it's primary role
is to bring up and expand displays and to offload
acceleration functions for video encode and decode.
They specifically said that it wouldn't be something
that people expect to game on, which of course means
that people are going to try and game on them.
Like, come on.
As we reported before, all of the new chips are going to
have this new iGPU, thanks to the IO die.
And if you are not GPU-limited, you're going to get
a lot more performance in games, because AMD has
further improved the front end, with some tweaks
and a doubled-up L2 cache, giving the Ryzen 9 7950X
a grand total of 80 MB of combined cache to play with.
As anyone who's followed our Ryzen coverage from day one
knows, keeping the beast fed is half the battle,
and this should help tremendously.
AMD's testing showed a 13% instructions-per-clock uplift
over Ryzen 5000, thanks to these tweaks of design,
when they had previously expected 8 to 10%,
and those clocks are much higher.
What'll also help is the transition to pure DDR5
for the new socket, AM5.
The nerdiest among you, like myself, will already know this,
but TLDR, socket AM5 is a brand new platform
that finally transitions AMD to using a land grid array,
like Intel or Threadripper do today,
instead of a pin-grid array, as previous generation
Ryzen processors used.
This increases the pin density, in this case 1,718,
and reduces the likelihood that you'll break your CPU
just by putting it down wrong.
No word yet, if they'll need that $8 Walmart CPU frame
to prevent flexing, but the extra pins will allow for
more power to flow to the socket, up to 230 watts,
and allow for more bandwidths to and from DDR5 memory
and PCI-express gen 5, which comes standard on all chipsets
for the NVME storage that AMD says we'll see in November.
But for the GPU, gen 5 will only be supported
on the two Xtreme series chipset variations.
Now, AMD says there is zero performance difference
between the chipsets and stock operation,
and that they should differ really only in IO
and power delivery for overclocking,
which all chipset variants do, in fact, support.
AMD's claiming that they'll support AM5
until at least 2025, which I mean,
that's like two and a half or three years from now.
Given that AM4 lasted for twice as long,
and was host to five whole generations of CPUs,
we can only hope that this is a case
of under-promise, over-deliver.
And hopefully, they'll over-deliver on their new
EXPO RAM specification, too.
This is AMD's answer to Intel's XMP,
and was announced a few months ago,
but AMD says that we should see over 15 kits available
at launch, at up to 6,400 mega-transfers per second.
XMP memory will still work, but AMD figures this will
make it a lot easier for vendors to tweak sub-timings
for Ryzen, and in typical AMD fashion,
the spec is fully open to the public.
The pricing for the chips themselves hasn't changed
compared to Ryzen 5000, except the 16-core Ryzen 9,
which is seeing a $100 discount for the newer chip.
Like, what is this, bizarro land?
Like in this economy, they're gonna do a discount?
Anyway, I don't have the sales data,
but it seems like a good bet that the 5950X didn't sell
as well as AMD had hoped, after its price hike
over the previous generation's 3950X.
Or perhaps they just felt embarrassed to have
the most expensive desktop CPU on the market, and would
like Intel's 12900KS to shoulder that now, instead.
Interestingly, the only Ryzen 7 option announced today
was the 7700X, not the 7800X.
My guess would be that AMD will use that name
for the 3D V-cache variant later on.
Probably sometime later this year, they said,
maybe early next year, I'm not entirely sure.
Most exciting for gamers, though,
is that AMD's $300 Ryzen 5 7600X
seemingly competes with, and wins against,
the Core i9 12900K,
a CPU that costs more than twice as much.
As with any claim from the manufacturer,
this is something that we're going to have to verify,
but it's also something that we're excited for,
especially if there's over-clocking headroom available,
given its 5.3 GHz stock max turbo speed.
No word yet on any less expensive non-XQs, though.
AMD says that they expect the lineup to expand
in a similar way to Ryzen 5000,
so we're probably looking at next year sometime,
for true budget options from Team Red.
This entire event was about Ryzen, but AMD being AMD,
they just couldn't help but talk a little bit about RDNA3,
as well, which is apparently going to feature
a 5 nm chiplet-based design that AMD claims
will provide a 50% performance per watt improvement
over current-gen Radeon GPUs.
Again, big win if true, next to the looming shadow
of RTX 4000.
They showed off a bit of gameplay as a teaser,
but that's really all we got.
I guess we'll just have to stay tuned.
The "too long-didn't watch," though, is this,
Ryzen 7000 looks far more of an upgrade
than people initially feared, and it doesn't look
like it's just gonna be Ryzen 5000 on DDR5.
Of course, this is all stuff we have to verify
for ourselves, again, I keep saying that, but it's true.
And we'll have a review as soon as we're able to launch it.
The whole AM5 platform, including the four CPUs
they're launching with it, will be coming out
on September 27th, and AMD says that they're confident
in their ability to keep up with demand.
Now we've heard that before, but hey, we can always hope.
Just like we can always hope for a response
in kind from Team Blue, and for a segue to our sponsor.
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- Thanks for watching, guys.
This is a, well it's been a while since we've done
an on-location shoot, hasn't it?
Maybe we can look at some of the previous Ryzen releases,
like the Ryzen 5000 announcement,
or some of the earlier Ryzen 7000 rumors.
It's been an interesting ride,
and it's been an interesting ride since Ryzen 1000, too.