News

The desktop processor market is an extremely competitive one. Every few months, companies release their newest products, claiming best-in-class performance or an industry first. This week, it was AMD’s turn for a new market release.

 
AMD Ryzen 9 7950X. Image courtesy of AMD

On Aug. 29, the company announced the release of its Ryzen 7000 desktop processor family claimed to feature “the fastest core in gaming.” AMD teased its much-anticipated CPU line codenamed "Raphael" at CES 2020 as the first of its processors to leverage AMD's “Zen 4” microarchitecture with TSMC's process technology.

AMD Unveils the Ryzen 7000 Series

While AMD's Ryzen 7000 processor family comes in four different SKUs, some of the strengths of the family are best illustrated through the performance features of the Ryzen 9 7950X processor. The 7950X is built around a 16-core processor cluster that is capable of clocking at speeds up to 5.7 GHz while supporting up to 32 threads simultaneously. Built off TSMC 5nm FinFET technology, the 7950 processor is based on an x86-64 ISA and features a default TDP of 170 W along with 1 MB of L1 cache, 16 MB of L2 cache, and 64 MB of L3 cache.

Ryzen 7000 family SKUs. Image courtesy of AMD
 

Designed explicitly for desktop and gaming applications, this new family also comes in lower-performance, more affordable models. Unlike the 7950 processor, which starts at $699, the most affordable member of the 7000 processor family is the Ryzen 5 7600x processor priced at $299. While the 7600x is the most affordable option in the series, it also has lower performance in the form of a 105 W TDP, and the total system cache is limited to 38 MB compared to 80 MB for the 7950X.

Compared to its major competitor, the Intel Core i9-12900K/KF, the Ryzen 9 7950X offers 0.5 GHz faster clock speeds and almost double the onboard cache.

Zen 4 Architecture in Action

From a hardware perspective, the biggest change introduced with the Ryzen 7000 family is the introduction of AMD’s Zen 4 architecture. With the Zen 4 architecture, the 7000 family is said to offer several significant performance improvements over previous Zen 3-based solutions.

First, the 7000 family’s 5.7 GHz maximum clock speed marks an 800 MHz improvement over the previous generation. An immediate result of this is that the Zen 4 processors are 29% more efficient in single-threaded performance while improving 45% in multi-threaded applications. This is complemented by a 13% improvement in instructions-per-cycle (IPC) compared to Zen 3.

Ryzen 5 7600X vs. Ryzen 5 5600X. Image courtesy of AMD
 

AMD also released its Geekbench 5 benchmarks. Some of the most impressive results from these showed that Zen 4 achieves a 70% improvement in single-threaded crypto workload along with a 45% improvement in multi-threaded integer workloads compared to Zen 3. These results may be misleading, however, since the gains in crypto are likely a result of Zen 4’s support for Intel's AVX-512, which offers performance improvements but is not widely used in practice.

Overall, AMD claims these improvements translate to 21% faster gaming performance on average and a performance-per-watt improvement of 27%.
 

AMD's First Big Desktop Processor Move Since 2020

The Ryzen 7000 series is AMD's first large architectural advance in desktop processors since its 2020 release of the Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 series. AMD says the new series can operate with 62% less power than the Ryzen 5000 series at the same level of performance. Alternatively, the 7000 series are reported to improve the performance of the 5000 series 49% while consuming the same amount of power.

AMD announced that the first Ryzen 7000 processors will go on sale Sept. 27.