Just as the prophecy, er, press release foretold, AMD announced its first Zen 4 CPUs at a media event last night. The company will be bringing four Zen 4 CPUs to market initially: the 7950X, 7900X, 7700X, and the 7600X. This covers a lot of ground for AMD as far as prices go, with the least expensive (7600X) going for $299 and the most expensive (7950X) hitting $699. The 7900X will sell for $549, and the 770X will sell for $399. Overall these prices are the same as those for the Zen 3 launch. This shows AMD is looking to be aggressive with Intel this time around by not raising prices at all. The initial batch of CPUs will go on sale on Sept. 27.
The brief livestream didn’t include a ton of new information, but AMD did release some “final” numbers for its Zen 4 architecture. Dr. Su said they originally had hoped to deliver an 8-10 percent uplift in IPC for Zen 4. However, as they’ve been optimizing it ahead of launch that number is now 13 percent. She also said AMD has been able to increase the maximum frequency to 5.7GHz at the “top of the stack.” That clock speed increase along with the IPC uplift allows for a 29 percent increase in single-core performance, at least on the Ryzen 9 7950X.
The doctor focused a lot on the flagship CPU at the event; the Ryzen 9 7950X. This is the company’s 16-thread, 32-core CPU. She noted it’s packing 80MB of L2/L3 cache, with a 170W TDP. This is quite an increase from Zen 3’s 105W maximum TDP. She displayed a chart showing the new chip dominating the older Ryzen 9 5950X in both 1080p gaming and content creation. In gaming, it was between six and 35 percent faster depending on the game measured. She said on average it’s 15 percent faster in gaming than the 5950X thanks to its single-core IPC uplift.
For content creation, it destroyed the Zen 3 CPU by 30 to 48 percent. She said it will average a performance increase of 40 percent for workloads such as rendering. She also compared it to the Core i9-12900K, showing it was faster than Intel’s flagship CPU in both gaming and content creation. In one test, V-ray, it was 62 percent faster than Alder Lake, with 47 percent better performance-per-watt, according to Dr. Su.
From there she discussed the rest of the stack, showing that all four Zen 4 CPUs were faster than the Core i9-12900K in single-core performance in Geekbench. To demonstrate this she showed an F1 2022 benchmark running on both the Core i9-12900k, and the “mainstream” Ryzen 7 7600X. Once it finished, the much less expensive Zen 4 CPU was faster than Intel’s flagship by 11 percent.
Next, Mark Papermaster delivered some more metrics on Zen 4’s advancements. Discussing the Ryzen 9 7950X, he said it can deliver the same performance as the 5950X with 62 percent less power. When compared with the 7nm Ryzen 5000 line in general, he said it offers 49 percent more performance at the same power consumption. He also mentioned the gains it has made across the three power envelopes: 65W, 105W, and 170W. The lion’s share of the gains is at the lower power levels, with the company reaching 35 and 37 percent gains on the high end. He went on to claim its die area is half the size of Alder Lake’s, while still being 47 percent more efficient.
Next, David McAfee came on stage to discuss the new AM5 platform. First, he noted it will have two classes of motherboards; X670 and B650. Both classes will offer standard and extreme versions. As an incentive for early adopters, the X670 boards will be available one month ahead of the less-expensive B-series boards. One big difference on the X-series boards is both will offer PCIe 5.0 for storage, but only the extreme boards will offer that connection for the GPU. We should note that we doubt Nvidia will make its next-gen GPUs PCIe 5.0, but AMD sure seems like it’s going to. Will that make a difference? We seriously doubt it. Still, it’s future-proofing.
Possibly most surprising was his announcement that the B-Series Extreme boards will also offer PCIe 5.0 graphics and storage. He then put an end to any rumors that AMD might support DDR4 memory. It will be DDR5 only, and will also support EXPO, or Extended Profiles for Overclocking. This was first leaked way back in April. It’s similar to Intel’s XMP as it enables “one-click” overclocking, which he says is good for up to an 11 percent boost in 1080p performance, as well as lower latency. He said they will be coming out of the gate with DDR5 6400 kits available from various partners such as Corsair. Finally, he said the AM5 motherboard market will be priced as low as $125 and will be guaranteed to be compatible until at least 2025. That’s not quite as long as AM4’s six-year lifecycle, but it’s certainly better than Intel’s two-CPUs-per-new-socket situation.
The event ended with Dr. Su finally showing off the pricing listed above, along with clock speeds, cache sizes, and TDP. She pulled a “one more thing” by showing a glimpse of an RDNA 3 GPU, just to tease the crowd. Unfortunately, all she showed was it running Lies of P from the developer Neowiz. She showed the game running smoothly at 4K on an unnamed GPU along with the Ryzen 9 7950X CPU. Sadly there was no frame counter, so it was a bit of a letdown without any metrics.
Overall there’s nothing too surprising in this announcement as it had all previously been leaked for the most part. Still, Zen 4 seems like it will be quite a capable platform. All the comparisons to Alder Lake were for naught though, as it will be going up against Intel’s Raptor Lake. We’re still not sure when that will launch, but that will be quite the matchup when it does happen.
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