AMD on footsteps to become Intel – Ryzen 7000 Specs
Introduction
Let’s talk about the new AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs that is the new CPU lineup from AMD coming out on September 27th so less than a month from now I expect reviews of the CPUs before then but today I kind of want to just unpack the announcement video which was they did earlier.
It goes over what models you can expect, the pricing the performance, and stuff like that we’re looking at very different AMD Ryzen CPUs that we have seen in previous years you know the lineup might look very similar 6 / 8, 12 / 16 cores which I’ll soon go over but the approach this time around is very close to intel.
New Socket Design
New Socket Design
Kicking things off one of the most important things you should know about these CPUs is that AMD starting fresh on a completely new platform it’s a new socket design, new heat spreader, new ddr5, and PCIe 5 as well as producing the CPUs on a denser five-nanometer processor.
If you can take away one thing from this information is that the entry cost for these new CPUs is quite steep I mean compared to what Ryzen has been for the past five years where if you want an upgrade you just pick the new generation, update your bios and drop in that new CPU now this time if you want to go from 5000 to 7000 you not only need a new motherboard but a fresh new shiny kit of ddr5 memory as well and In some cases, those two things could be more than the cost of the CPU upgrade.
Similarity
Similarity
One thing that is kind of similar to the Ryzen 5000 series is the lineup in terms of the core counts that AMD is kicking things off with so we have the six-core 7600x, Eight core 7700x, 12-core 7900x and the 16-core flagship 7950x.
The Change
One thing that has changed significantly is the clock speeds this is probably the biggest difference they’ve been lifted a hefty amount. This is an area where AMD has struggled to keep up with intel that has been comfortably over that 5ghz mark for a while now and at this point, AMD has leaped past them by a significant jump. The flagship 7950x for example tops out at a monstrous 5.7 gigahertz granted that is the peak clock speed that you can expect in probably a single core bursty type of workload even the 7600x peaks at 5.3 gigahertz which hopefully means that we can expect confident five gigahertz performance when it comes to something like gaming.
More Power Consumption
Because higher clock speeds come with more power and the listed power consumption of Ryzen 7000 has crept up quite a bit the six-core will no doubt be a fan favorite for gamers with 105-watt TDP this time compared to the previous gen’s 5600x which had only a 65-watt TDP the high core count parts list a 170-watt TDP now and given how intel and AMD list their TDP’s differently intel is typically a lot closer to what you can expect in real-world actual power consumption I’d probably expect the 7900x and 7950x to now be around that 200-watt mark in terms of full blast in general at least a lot closer to intel.
Cooling Systems Backwards Compatibility with a Catch
Even though this new am5 platform will be backward compatible with am4 CPU coolers essentially the coolers that you’ve been running on every Ryzen system up until now you probably still want to consider an upgrade with these massive TDP increases there has also been a slight bump in the amount of CPU cache across the new lineup nothing crazy like what we saw with the Ryzen 5800x3d where the l3 cache was tripled it looks like AMD will be saving that trick a bit further down the road with zen 4d so those are the CPUs to expect.
Performance
Performance
AMD is claiming a 13 uplift in IPC over Ryzen 5000 so clock for clock a zen 4 core would be 13 faster and to that with those huge clock speed increases have enabled a 29 increase in single-threaded performance so we’re still limited to 16 cores and 32 threads on the top end but on the other hand, we have up to 5.7 gigahertz massive almost a 30 increase in single-threaded performance. I think that is a really good shift in the right direction with a lot of programs being GPU accelerated these days. I don’t care for more than 12 cores or 10 cores I have a 16 core on my system I barely even get close to maxing that out I mean pretty much every program out there will you know get performance gains from more single-threaded performance and higher clock speeds but not every program even content creation or production kind of focused will scale well by adding more cores.
Similarity with INTEL
You will see AMD kind of shifting a little bit more focus to what intel has been doing intel has been gradually adding more cores but the focus has always been on higher clock speeds and more single-threaded performance and you know requiring more power to do that. Now of course you want to wait for independent testing and reviews but let’s take a look at the performance numbers that AMD has listed and so far they’re looking good.
AMD Ryzen 7950x vs 5950x
AMD Ryzen 7950x vs 5950x
The new 7950x versus the previous 5950x there’s a nice bump across a few different games and in production workloads, you’re looking at an easy plus 40% so CPU rendering and encoding expect pretty big gains there again though the new platform new memory higher power consumption speaking of which here’s the new 7950x versus the 12900k surprisingly gaming performance looks kind of even I mean they’re only showing four games here but indeed they would show more performance. If they could something that’ll be interesting to test multi-threaded performance. on the other hand, as expected huge jump there and that’s basically because AMD is operating now on equal power to intel.
AMD Ryzen 7950x vs 5950x
In fact, in these benchmarks AMD seem to be running their 7950x at more power than the 12900k in v-ray, for example, the 7950x is 62% faster but that performance margin drops when they run at equal power to the I9 12900k that can only mean one thing.
By default at least in these testing conditions as AMD has set up, these two CPUs have the Ryzen 9 7950x pulling more power than a 12900k and that’s pretty insane to think about. I mean the I9 12900k is a chip that can pull comfortably 220 watts in these types of workloads.
Some motherboards even running it is above 250 watts so those kinds of levels for AMD actually beyond that’s simply unheard of there are some benchmarks here for the 7600x as well AMD is claiming a 5% advantage over the I9 12900k on average slower in some games and then you have double-digit performance gains in others so at least based on these performance benchmarks that we’ve seen so far.
They look okay but nothing insane about to rush out and get super hyped about it at least in my opinion I mean don’t get me wrong 7600x basically tying the performance of the 12900k you know your competitor’s top-tier products from the last generation that are impressive but it’s not like new platform new memory more power type of impressive.
If you kind of get what I’m saying it’s a high entry cost for not much of an advantage especially when you consider the 12-900k is not too different from an I5 12600k and I mean that comparison then starts to look you know not as compelling even on the AMD side of things you can pretty much get that same performance jump from a 5800x 3D which is a CPU which is currently under 400 and it’s a simple drop-in upgrade if you currently have an AMD Ryzen build up and running now no doubt Zen4 will be more efficient than zen3 AMD said that you can expect roughly 62 percent lower power at equal performance and about 50 percent more performance at the same power but the bigger picture here is by default, AMD is now a lot more comfortable pushing that power envelope out of the box this time around they’ll be configured to run higher clock speeds more power, and a more unlocked approach similar to intel. I don’t know what caused this shift maybe they just don’t want to be left out you know between themselves intel and Nvidia, AMD has been the only company out of those three to not go down that route of more performance you know from more power as aggressively as the other two but I think now they realize that they can demonstrate much larger performance gains if they just do the same thing.
New Motherboards
New Motherboards
We kind of get a closer picture of this when the new motherboards are detailed. Here it’s noted that the new boards will allow up to 230 watts of socket power delivery and that is typically something that AMD would note is supported at stock in other words without overclocking and that pretty much confirms the power levels that we were expecting looking at that 7950x v-ray benchmark other than that you can expect two series of boards to be coming out x670 to start with which will be your enthusiast-class boards very expensive overkill VRM’s for most people but hey if you’ve got a production type the system that would be a pretty enticing option and then you’ve got b650 which should be a more mainstream-oriented the lineup of boards those will be coming out in October.
Conclusion
So closing things up on a new platform like this is always really exciting. There are new motherboards and new CPUs to test it’s always very exciting for an enthusiast and a reviewer standpoint in terms of all the different experiences that you get from it but if you’re just a gamer or like an average pc enjoyer this is just not looking like the play in In general it’s just looking like a pretty big entry cost to something like a 5800 x3d b550 motherboard and a ddr4 memory kit which in reality looks like it’s going to perform kind of similar now we’ll say the pricing of the CPUs themselves haven’t changed much is very similar to Ryzen 5000 but again you also have to buy that fresh motherboard along with a set of ddr5 which is still very expensive.
Obviously, AMD has to jump ship from am4 eventually they’ve supported that platform pretty well at this point but hopefully, they can justify that new entry cost and higher power consumption with some big performance gains.
Overall, it’s a very different-looking AMD Ryzen from what we’ve seen in the past five years but hopefully, the story will be a bit different when we get to the actual benchmarks.
