Andrew Cunningham
Almost two years after the first Ryzen 7000 CPUs came out, AMD is back with a full-fledged follow-up. The new Ryzen 9000 chips — the 6-core 9600X, 8-core 9700X, 12-core 9900X, and 16-core 9950X — bring AMD’s new Zen 5 architecture to the desktop just weeks after introducing Ryzen AI. Laptops.
We came away impressed with both its performance and its power efficiency, named the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, and AMD has also leaned on power efficiency as a key selling point of the Ryzen 9000 series. All three chips have seen their power limits significantly reduced compared to last-gen chips, while boasting low double-digit performance increases. That’s rare at a time when Intel is pushing its chips to the brink to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the high-end Core i9 and Core i7 chips.
A focus on power efficiency will give many users—especially those who don’t touch the default settings—less-power-hungry chips that run a bit cooler. And for people willing to tinker and trade some of that performance for a performance boost, many of these chips (especially the 9700X and 9900X) have extra performance headroom. It’s also nice that all AM5 motherboards on the market should be compatible with the 9000 series once a BIOS update is installed, and the AM5 platform’s mandatory BIOS flashback support means you don’t need to resort to weird, difficult hacks. A “boot kit” is like a CPU loaner program To update the BIOS when you purchase a board with an older BIOS installed.
But it’s not all smooth sailing. Motherboard and RAM costs remain an issue across the AM5 platform, two years after launch, especially for budget buyers. The launch price is high, especially compared to current street prices for the 7000 and 7000X3D series CPUs. We ran into a few bugs during testing, which could bite other early adopters while we wait for AMD and motherboard makers to straighten things out.
Measure the Gen 5
Compared to the Ryzen 7000 launch, AMD is releasing new CPUs, a new architecture, a new I/O die (IOD), new chipsets, a new integrated GPU, (mandatory) DDR5 support, and a brand-new processor socket. At the same time, the Ryzen 9000 release is very simple. So is the IoT. The integrated RDNA2-based GPU is the same (and, it’s worth reiterating, not intended for playing games). The AM5 socket is the same. Officially supported DDR5 speeds range slightly from DDR5-5200 to DDR5-5600. But the widespread presence and support of factory-overclocked RAM on desktop motherboards doesn’t necessarily mean a modest bump to officially supported RAM speeds; AMD still recommends DDR5-6000 for optimal performance.
There are new 800-series chipsets, but they’re vastly improved over the older 600-series chipsets, and AMD isn’t shipping new motherboards with new processors. Instead we’ve been advised to install the new BIOS update on existing X670E boards from the Ryzen 7000 release (even though forward compatibility is a selling point, which never happens). This seems to be a subtle signal from AMD—don’t feel like waiting or paying extra for a new motherboard, which will only add to the AM5 platform’s stubbornly high base price.
It gives us only two new things: the Gen 5 architecture and a new core chiplet die (CCD) that integrates up to eight Gen 5 cores.
The Ryzen 9000’s Zen 5 CCD is built using TSMC’s N4P process, an upgrade from the 5 nm process used in the Ryzen 7000 series. DSMC He says N4P is 22 percent more energy efficient than the 5 nm process, which is part of enabling AMD to use a lower TDP for most Ryzen 9000X CPUs while still delivering faster performance.
This may have at least a bit to do with the Ryzen 9000’s lower operating temperatures, which AMD claims should be 7° Celsius lower than equivalent Ryzen 7000 CPUs at the same power levels. Ryzen 7000X chips run at their default TDPs, and although AMD claims this is normal and safe behavior, a cooler chip generally provides better stability and longer life.
A major architectural change from Gen 4 relates to the support for AVX512 extensions introduced by Intel (Unpopular, in some circles) in 2017 with some high-end Skylake variants but not running on recent consumer CPUs because Intel’s E-cores don’t support them. Gen 4 brought AVX512 instructions to Ryzen CPUs for the first time, but it did so by combining two 256-bit data paths. The Zen 5 has a full 512-bit data path for the AVX512 instructions, and for the (still rare) tasks that actually use the AVX512, this gives the Zen 5 a proportionally higher performance boost.
