AMD Zen 4 Ryzen 7000

So let's talk about the new AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs. This is the new CPU lineup from AMD coming out on September 27th so less than a month from now I definitely expect reviews of the CPUs, before then! But today, I kind of want to just unpack the announcement video!! What models you can expect, the pricing, the performance and stuff like that!! Basically we're looking at a very different AMD verison, that we've seen in previous years. You know the lineup might look very similar 6, 8, 12, & 16 cores which we'll soon go over. But the approach this time around is actually very close to Intel, so kicking things off. 

One of the most important things you should know about these CPUs is that AMD are starting fresh on a completely new platform. It's a new socket design, new heat spreader, new DDR5 and PCI E5, as well as producing the CPUs on a denser five nanometer process. Basically if you can take away one thing from this article 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 basically 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. Now 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, the eight core 7700x, 12 core 7900x and the 16 core flagship 7950x. One thing that has changed significantly though are, the clock speeds!! This is probably the biggest difference!!! They've been lifted a hefty amount this is an area, where have struggled to keep up with Intel, who have been comfortably over that five GHz 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 GHz, 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 GHz, which hopefully means that we can expect confident five GHz performance, when it comes to something like gaming. Now of course with those higher clock speeds, comes more power and in fact the listed power consumption of Ryzen 7000 has been crept up quite a bit. The six core, which will no doubt be a fan favorite for gamers, 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 TDPs 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, so even though this new AM5 platform will be backwards 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 literally 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. now let's take a look at performance, AMD are claiming a 13 uplift in IPC over Ryzen 5000. So 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 32 threads on the top end, but on the other hand we have you know up to 5.7 gigs massive, almost a 30% increase in single threaded performance. Personally I think that is like a really good shift in the right direction, with a lot of programs being GPU accelerated these days personally as a content creator you know I don't care for more than 12 cores or 10 core. I have a 16 core on my own 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 just by adding more cores, this is actually the first hint that you'll see of AMD kind of shifting. A little bit more focus to what Intel has been doing. Intel have 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 have listed and so far they're looking good. 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 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 surely they'd show more performance if they could definitely 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. In fact in these benchmarks AMD seems to be running their 7950x at more power that 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 12900k. That can only mean one thing, by default at least in these testing conditions how AMD has set up these two CPUs. They have the Ryzen 7950x pulling more power than a 12900k, and that's pretty insane to think about. I mean the 12900k is a chip that can pull comfortably 220 watts in these types of workloads, some motherboards even running it above 250 watts. So those kind of levels for AMD actually beyond, that's simply unheard of. There are some benchmarks here for the 7600x as well, AMD are claiming a 5% advantage over the 12900k, on average slower in some games and then you have double digit performance gains in others. So at least based off of these performance benchmarks, that we've seen so far, I mean they look okay but nothing insane about to rush out and get super hyped about. At least in my opinion 7600x basically tying the performance of the 12900k, you know your competitor's top tier product from last generation that's 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 12900k is not too different from a 12600k, I mean that comparison then starts to look you know not as compelling in fact even on the AMD side of things. You can pretty much get that same performance jump from a 5800X3D 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% lower power at equal performance, and about 50% more performance at the same power. But the bigger picture here is that by default AMD are 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.

Now 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 have 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. Now we kind of getting 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 about 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 VRMs for most people. But if you've got a production type  system that would be a pretty enticing option and then you've got B650 which should be a more mainstream oriented lineup of boards, those will be coming out in October.

All right so closing things up a new platform like this is always really exciting. There's new motherboards new CPUs to test. It's always very exciting from 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 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 gonna perform kind of similar. Now we'll say the pricing of the CPUs themselves haven't changed, much are 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. Now obviously AMD have 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 really 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 is a bit different, when we get to the actual benchmarks.