AMD Details Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 and AM5 – Launch September 27th

AMD has today shared more details on its upcoming Ryzen 7000 Series – Zen 4 – desktop processors. Shipping to customers on September 27^th, the flagship 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X will sell for $699 USD and is touted as having 13% IPC uplift versus Zen 3, up to 5.7GHz peak frequency, and up to 29% higher single-thread performance against Ryzen 5000.

The three other Zen 4 desktop processors shipping at launch are the 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X for $549, the 8-core Ryzen 7 7700X for $399, and the 6-core Ryzen 5 7600X at $299. All of these processors are based on the new Zen 4 architecture – which is a derivative of Zen 3 with enhancements – and they are built using TSMC’s 5nm process node.

Ryzen 7000 Series

Looking more closely at the product stack, we see the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X featuring 16 cores and 32 threads. The base clock speed is 4.5GHz with a boost frequency up to 5.7GHz – which is a lofty 800MHz higher than the Ryzen 9 5950X this chip replaces!

Total cache is 80MB thanks to a doubling of the L2 cache to 16MB compared with Ryzen 5950X. And the TDP is rated at 170W – a new increase versus the typical 105W TDP that we have been used to with AM4 desktop chips.

AMD said that this increase to 170W TDP is simply because it is what the market participants have been asking for. Plus, their confidence in the chip’s ability to efficiently deliver its required performance mean that the higher TDP can be deployed for when higher performance is necessitated, without compromising lower-power workload efficiency.

Looking at the other chips aside from the flagship, we have the 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X that runs at 4.7GHz base and up to 5.6GHz boost. This processor is essentially a cut down Ryzen 9 7950X, so its cache capacity is reduced by 4MB total on the Level 2, but the TDP is maintained at 170W.

And then the $399 Ryzen 7 7700X and $299 Ryzen 5 7600X are both 105W TDP chips. The Ryzen 7’s eight cores are rated at 4.5GHz base and up to 5.4GHz boost with 40MB of total cache. And the Ryzen 5 is clocked a little higher on the base at 4.7GHz, with a boost of up to 5.3GHz and 38MB of cache.

Of clear relevance is the across-the-board boost frequency loftiness of well over 5GHz – and actually more than five-and-a-half Gigahertz for the two Ryzen 9 processors. Clearly, enhanced boost frequencies are one of the key areas of improvement with Ryzen 7000 versus all Zen-based predecessors that we have seen to date, not just Ryzen 5000.

The other area worth noting are the USD-based MSRPs. The new flagship Ryzen 9 7950X comes in at $699 USD which is $100 cheaper than the Ryzen 9 5950X at launch. Given the current state of the Great British Pound, an optimistic guesstimate would put this at perhaps £649-699 in the UK at launch. So, AMD is clearly confident in its ability to compete with the £600-650 Core i9-12900K/KS based on the current, pre-Intel 13^th Gen market.

In fact, AMD was very keen to show off its performance advantages for the Ryzen 9 7950X versus Intel’s Core i9-12900K. In a V-Ray rendering workload that we were shown at the launch announcement in Texas, AMD’s chip was up to 57% higher performance with up to 47% better performance-per-Watt.

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