Ryzen

ryzen-9-9950x3d-review:-seriously-fast,-if-a-step-backward-in-efficiency

Ryzen 9 9950X3D review: Seriously fast, if a step backward in efficiency


Not a lot of people actually need this thing, but if you do, it’s very good.

AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Even three years later, AMD’s high-end X3D-series processors still aren’t a thing that most people need to spend extra money on—under all but a handful of circumstances, your GPU will be the limiting factor when you’re running games, and few non-game apps benefit from the extra 64MB chunk of L3 cache that is the processors’ calling card. They’ve been a reasonably popular way for people with old AM4 motherboards to extend the life of their gaming PCs, but for AM5 builds, a regular Zen 4 or Zen 5 CPU will not bottleneck modern graphics cards most of the time.

But high-end PC building isn’t always about what’s rational, and people spending $2,000 or more to stick a GeForce RTX 5090 into their systems probably won’t worry that much about spending a couple hundred extra dollars to get the fastest CPU they can get. That’s the audience for the new Ryzen 9 9950X3D, a 16-core, Zen 5-based, $699 monster of a processor that AMD begins selling tomorrow.

If you’re only worried about game performance (and if you can find one), the Ryzen 7 9800X3D is the superior choice, for reasons that will become apparent once we start looking at charts. But if you want fast game performance and you need as many CPU cores as you can get for other streaming or video production or rendering work, the 9950X3D is there for you. (It’s a little funny to me that this a chip made almost precisely for the workload of the PC building tech YouTubers who will be reviewing it.)  It’s also a processor that Intel doesn’t have any kind of answer to.

Second-generation 3D V-Cache

Layering the 3D V-Cache under the CPU die has made most of the 9950X3D’s improvements possible. Credit: AMD

AMD says the 9000X3D chips use a “second-generation” version of its 3D V-Cache technology after using the same approach for the Ryzen 5000 and 7000 processors. The main difference is that, where the older chips stack the 64MB of extra L3 cache on top of the processor die, the 9000 series stacks the cache underneath, making it easier to cool the CPU silicon.

This makes the processors’ thermal characteristics much more like a typical Ryzen CPU without the 3D V-Cache. And because voltage and temperatures are less of a concern, the 9800X3D, 9900X3D, and 9950X3D all support the full range of overclocking and performance tuning tools that other Ryzen CPUs support.

The 12- and 16-core Ryzen X3D chips are built differently from the 8-core. As we’ve covered elsewhere, AMD’s Ryzen desktop processors are a combination of chiplets—up to two CPU core chiplets with up to eight CPU cores each and a separate I/O die that handles things like PCI Express and USB support. In the 9800X3D, you just have one CPU chiplet, and the 64MB of 3D V-Cache is stacked underneath. For the 9900X3D and 9950X3D, you get one 8-core CPU die with V-Cache underneath and then one other CPU die with 4 or 8 cores enabled and no extra cache.

AMD’s driver software is responsible for deciding what apps get run on which CPU cores. Credit: AMD

It’s up to AMD’s chipset software to decide what kinds of apps get to run on each kind of CPU core. Non-gaming workloads prioritize the normal CPU cores, which are generally capable of slightly higher peak clock speeds, while games that benefit disproportionately from the extra cache are run on those cores instead. AMD’s software can “park” the non-V-Cache CPU cores when you’re playing games to ensure they’re not accidentally being run on less-suitable CPU cores.

This technology will work the same basic way for the 9950X3D as it did for the older 7950X3D, but AMD has made some tweaks. Updates to the chipset driver mean that you can swap your current processor out for an X3D model without needing to totally reinstall Windows to get things working, for example, which was AMD’s previous recommendation for the 7000 series. Another update will improve performance for Windows 10 systems with virtualization-based security (VBS) enabled, though if you’re still on Windows 10, you should be considering an upgrade to Windows 11 so you can keep getting security updates past October.

And for situations where AMD’s drivers can’t automatically send the right workloads to the right kinds of cores, AMD also maintains a compatibility database of applications that need special treatment to take advantage of the 3D V-Cache in the 9900X3D and 9950X3D. AMD says it has added a handful of games to that list for the 9900/9950X3D launch, including Far Cry 6Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and a couple of Total War games, among others.

Testbed notes

Common elements to all the platforms we test in our CPU testbed include a Lian Li O11 Air Mini case with an EVGA-provided Supernova 850 P6 power supply and a 280 mm Corsair iCue H115i Elite Capellix AIO cooler.

Since our last CPU review, we’ve done a bit of testbed updating to make sure that we’re accounting for a bunch of changes and turmoil on both Intel’s and AMD’s sides of the fence.

For starters, we’re running Windows 11 24H2 on all systems now, which AMD has said should marginally improve performance for architectures going all the way back to Zen 3 (on the desktop, the Ryzen 5000 series). The company made this revelation after early reviewers of the Ryzen 9000 series couldn’t re-create the oddball conditions of their own internal test setups.

As for Intel, the new testing incorporates fixes for the voltage spiking, processor-destroying bugs that affected 13th- and 14th-generation Core processors, issues that Intel fixed in phases throughout 2024. For the latest Core Ultra 200-series desktop CPUs, it also includes performance fixes Intel introduced in BIOS updates and drivers late last year and early this year. (You might have noticed that we didn’t run reviews of the 9800X3D or the Core Ultra 200 series at the time; all of this re-testing of multiple generations of CPUs was part of the reason why).

All of this is to say that any numbers you’re seeing in this review represent recent testing with newer Windows updates, BIOS updates, and drivers all installed.

One thing that isn’t top of the line at the moment is the GeForce RTX 4090, though we are using that now instead of a Radeon RX 7900 XTX.

The RTX 50 series was several months away from being announced when we began collecting updated test data, and we opted to keep the GPU the same for our 9950X3D testing so that we’d have a larger corpus of data to compare the chip to. The RTX 4090 is still, by a considerable margin, the second-fastest consumer GPU that exists right now. But at some point, when we’re ready to do yet another round of totally-from-scratch retesting, we’ll likely swap a 5090 in just to be sure we’re not bottlenecking the processor.

Performance and power: Benefits with fewer drawbacks

The 9950X3D has the second-highest CPU scores in our gaming benchmarks, and it’s behind the 9800X3D by only a handful of frames. This is one of the things we meant when we said that the 9800X3D was the better choice if you’re only worried about game performance. The same dynamic plays out between other 8- and 16-core Ryzen chips—higher power consumption and heat in the high-core-count chips usually bring game performance down just a bit despite the nominally higher boost clocks.

You’ll also pay for it in power consumption, at least at each chip’s default settings. On average, the 9950X3D uses 40 or 50 percent more power during our gaming benchmarks than the 9800X3D running the same benchmarks, even though it’s not capable of running them quite as quickly. But it’s similar to the power use of the regular 9950X, which is quite a bit slower in these gaming benchmarks, even if it does have broadly similar performance in most non-gaming benchmarks.

What’s impressive is what you see when you compare the 9950X3D to its immediate predecessor, the 7950X3D. The 9950X3D isn’t dramatically faster in games, reflecting Zen 5’s modest performance improvement over Zen 4. But the 9950X3D is a lot faster in our general-purpose benchmarks and other non-gaming CPU benchmarks because the changes to how the X3D chips are packaged have helped AMD keep clock speeds, voltages, and power limits pretty close to the same as they are for the regular 9950X.

In short, the 7950X3D gave up a fair bit of performance relative to the 7950X because of compromises needed to support 3D V-Cache. The 9950X3D doesn’t ask you to make the same compromises.

Testing the 9950X3D in its 105 W Eco Mode.

That comes with both upsides and downsides. For example, the 9950X3D looks a lot less power-efficient under load in our Handbrake video encoding test than the 7950X3D because it is using the same amount of power as a normal Ryzen processor. But that’s the other “normal” thing about the 9950X3D—the ability to manually tune those power settings and boost your efficiency if you’re OK with giving up a little performance. It’s not an either/or thing. And at least in our testing, games run just as fast when you set the 9950X3D to use the 105 W Eco Mode instead of the 170 W default TDP.

As for Intel, it just doesn’t have an answer for the X3D series. The Core Ultra 9 285K is perfectly competitive in our general-purpose CPU benchmarks and efficiency, but the Arrow Lake desktop chips struggle to compete with 14th-generation Core and Ryzen 7000 processors in gaming benchmarks, to say nothing of the Ryzen 9000 and to say even less than nothing of the 9800X3D or 9950X3D. That AMD has closed the gap between the 9950X and 9950X3D’s performance in our general-purpose CPU benchmarks means it’s hard to make an argument for Intel here.

The 9950X3D stands alone

I’m not and have never been the target audience for either the 16-core Ryzen processors or the X3D-series processors. When I’m building for myself (and when I’m recommending mainstream builds for our Ars System Guides), I’m normally an advocate for buying the most CPU you can for $200 or $300 and spending more money on a GPU.

But for the game-playing YouTubing content creators who are the 9950X3D’s intended audience, it’s definitely an impressive chip. Games can hit gobsmackingly high frame rates at lower resolutions when paired with a top-tier GPU, behind (and just barely behind) AMD’s own 9800X3D. At the same time, it’s just as good at general-use CPU-intensive tasks as the regular 9950X, fixing a trade-off that had been part of the X3D series since the beginning. AMD has also removed the limits it has in place on overclocking and adjusting power limits for the X3D processors in the 5000 and 7000 series.

So yes, it’s expensive, and no, most people probably don’t need the specific benefits it provides. It’s also possible that you’ll find edge cases where AMD’s technology for parking cores and sending the right kinds of work to the right CPU cores doesn’t work the way it should. But for people who do need or want ultra-high frame rates at lower resolutions or who have some other oddball workloads that benefit from the extra cache, the 9950X3D gives you all of the upsides with no discernible downsides other than cost. And, hey, even at $699, current-generation GPU prices almost make it look like a bargain.

The good

  • Excellent combination of the 9800X3D’s gaming performance and the 9950X’s general-purpose CPU performance
  • AMD has removed limitations on overclocking and power limit tweaking
  • Pretty much no competition for Intel for the specific kind of person the 9950X3D will appeal to

The bad

  • Niche CPUs that most people really don’t need to buy
  • Less power-efficient out of the box than the 7950X3D, though users have latitude to tune efficiency manually if they want
  • AMD’s software has sometimes had problems assigning the right kinds of apps to the right kinds of CPU cores, though we didn’t have issues with this during our testing

The ugly

  • Expensive

Photo of Andrew Cunningham

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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amd-says-top-tier-ryzen-9900x3d-and-9950x3d-cpus-arrive-march-12-for-$599-and-$699

AMD says top-tier Ryzen 9900X3D and 9950X3D CPUs arrive March 12 for $599 and $699

Like the 7950X3D and 7900X3D, these new X3D chips combine a pair of AMD’s CPU chiplets, one that has the extra 64MB of cache stacked underneath it and one that doesn’t. For the 7950X3D, you get eight cores with extra cache and eight without; for the 7900X3D, you get eight cores with extra cache and four without.

It’s up to AMD’s chipset software to decide what kinds of apps get to run on each kind of CPU core. Non-gaming workloads prioritize the normal CPU cores, which are generally capable of slightly higher peak clock speeds, while games that benefit disproportionately from the extra cache are run on those cores instead. AMD’s software can “park” the non-V-Cache CPU cores when you’re playing games to ensure they’re not accidentally being run on less-suitable CPU cores.

We didn’t have issues with this core parking technology when we initially tested the 7950X3D and 7900X3D, and AMD has steadily made improvements since then to make sure that core parking is working properly. The new 9000-series X3D chips should benefit from that work, too. To get the best results, AMD officially recommends a fresh and fully updated Windows install, along with the newest BIOS for your motherboard and the newest AMD chipset drivers; swapping out another Ryzen CPU for an X3D model (or vice versa) without reinstalling Windows can occasionally lead to CPUs being parked (or not parked) when they are supposed to be (or not supposed to be).

AMD says top-tier Ryzen 9900X3D and 9950X3D CPUs arrive March 12 for $599 and $699 Read More »

amd’s-new-laptop-cpu-lineup-is-a-mix-of-new-silicon-and-new-names-for-old-silicon

AMD’s new laptop CPU lineup is a mix of new silicon and new names for old silicon

AMD’s CES announcements include a tease about next-gen graphics cards, a new flagship desktop CPU, and a modest refresh of its processors for handheld gaming PCs. But the company’s largest announcement, by volume, is about laptop processors.

Today the company is expanding the Ryzen AI 300 lineup with a batch of updated high-end chips with up to 16 CPU cores and some midrange options for cheaper Copilot+ PCs. AMD has repackaged some of its high-end desktop chips for gaming laptops, including the first Ryzen laptop CPU with 3D V-Cache enabled. And there’s also a new-in-name-only Ryzen 200 series, another repackaging of familiar silicon to address lower-budget laptops.

Ryzen AI 300 is back, along with high-end Max and Max+ versions

Ryzen AI is back, with Max and Max+ versions that include huge integrated GPUs. Credit: AMD

We came away largely impressed by the initial Ryzen AI 300 processors in August 2024, and new processors being announced today expand the lineup upward and downward.

AMD is announcing the Ryzen AI 7 350 and Ryzen AI 5 340 today, along with identically specced Pro versions of the same chips with a handful of extra features for large businesses and other organizations.

Midrange Ryzen AI processors should expand Copilot+ features into somewhat cheaper x86 PCs.

Credit: AMD

The 350 includes eight CPU cores split evenly between large Zen 5 cores and smaller, slower but more efficient Zen 5C cores, plus a Radeon 860M with eight integrated graphics cores (down from a peak of 16 for the Ryzen AI 9). The 340 has six CPU cores, again split evenly between Zen 5 and Zen 5C, and a Radeon 840M with four graphics cores. But both have the same 50 TOPS NPUs as the higher-end Ryzen AI chips, qualifying both for the Copilot+ label.

For consumers, AMD is launching three high-end chips across the new “Ryzen AI Max+” and “Ryzen AI Max” families. Compared to the existing Strix Point-based Ryzen AI processors, Ryzen AI Max+ and Max include more CPU cores, and all of their cores are higher-performing Zen 5 cores, with no Zen 5C cores mixed in. The integrated graphics also get significantly more powerful, with as many as 40 cores built in—these chips seem to be destined for larger thin-and-light systems that could benefit from more power but don’t want to make room for a dedicated GPU.

AMD’s new laptop CPU lineup is a mix of new silicon and new names for old silicon Read More »

amd-launches-new-ryzen-9000x3d-cpus-for-pcs-that-play-games-and-work-hard

AMD launches new Ryzen 9000X3D CPUs for PCs that play games and work hard

AMD’s batch of CES announcements this year includes just two new products for desktop PC users: the new Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D. Both will be available at some point in the first quarter of 2025.

Both processors include additional CPU cores compared to the 9800X3D that launched in November. The 9900X3D includes 12 Zen 5 CPU cores with a maximum clock speed of 5.5 GHz, and the 9950X3D includes 16 cores with a maximum clock speed of 5.7 GHz. Both include 64MB of extra L3 cache compared to the regular 9900X and 9950X, for a total cache of 144MB and 140MB, respectively; games in particular tend to benefit disproportionately from this extra cache memory.

But the 9950X3D and 9900X3D aren’t being targeted at people who build PCs primarily to game—the company says their game performance is usually within 1 percent of the 9800X3D. These processors are for people who want peak game performance when they’re playing something but also need lots of CPU cores for chewing on CPU-heavy workloads during the workday.

AMD estimates that the Ryzen 9 9950X3D is about 8 percent faster than the 7950X3D when playing games and about 13 percent faster in professional content creation apps. These modest gains are more or less in line with the small performance bump we’ve seen in other Ryzen 9000-series desktop CPUs.

AMD launches new Ryzen 9000X3D CPUs for PCs that play games and work hard Read More »

old-and-new-ryzen-cpus-get-a-speed-boost-from-optional-windows-update

Old and new Ryzen CPUs get a speed boost from optional Windows update

will you upgrade from windows 10 yet —

And it turns out that old Ryzen CPUs benefit almost as much as newer ones.

AMD's Ryzen 7 7700X.

Enlarge / AMD’s Ryzen 7 7700X.

Andrew Cunningham

Among AMD’s explanations for the somewhat underwhelming Ryzen 9000 performance reports from reviewers earlier this month: that the upcoming Windows 11 24H2 update would bring some improvements to the CPU scheduler that would boost the performance of the new CPUs and their Zen 5-based architecture.

But rather than make Ryzen owners wait for the 24H2 update to come out later this fall (or make them install a beta version of a major OS update), AMD and Microsoft have backported the scheduler improvements to Windows 11 23H2. Users of Ryzen 5000, 7000, and 9000 CPUs can install the KB5041587 update by going to Windows Update in Settings, selecting Advanced Options, and then Optional Updates.

“We expect the performance uplift to be very similar between 24H2 and 23H2 with KB5041587 installed,” an AMD representative told Ars.

In current versions of Windows 11 23H2, the CPU scheduler optimizations are only available using Windows’ built-in Administrator account. The update enables them for typical user accounts, too.

Older AMD CPUs benefit, too

AMD’s messaging has focused mainly on how the 24H2 update (and 23H2 with the KB5041587 update installed) improves Ryzen 9000 performance; across a handful of provided benchmarks, the company says speeds can improve by anything between zero and 13 percent over Windows 11 23H2. There are also benefits for users of CPUs that use the older Zen 4 (Ryzen 7000/8000G) and Zen 3 (Ryzen 5000) architectures, but AMD hasn’t been specific about how much either of these older architectures would improve.

The Hardware Unboxed YouTube channel has done some early game testing with the current builds of the 24H2 update, and there’s good news for Ryzen 7000 CPU owners and less good news for AMD. The channel found that, on average, across dozens of games, average frame rates increased by about 10 percent for a Zen 4-based Ryzen 7 7700X. Ryzen 7 9700X improved more, as AMD said it would, but only by 11 percent. At default settings, the 9700X is only 2 or 3 percent faster than the nearly 2-year-old 7700X in these games, whether you’re running the 24H2 update or not.

This early data suggests that both Ryzen 7000 and Ryzen 5000 owners will see at least a marginal benefit from upgrading to Windows 11 24H2, which is a nice thing to get for free with a software update. But there are caveats. Hardware Unboxed tested for CPU performance strictly in games running at 1080p on a high-end Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090—one of the few scenarios in any modern gaming PC where your CPU might limit your performance before your GPU would. If you play at a higher resolution like 1440p or 4K, your GPU will usually go back to being the bottleneck, and CPU performance improvements won’t be as noticeable.

The update is also taking already-high frame rates and making them even higher; one game went from an average frame rate of 142 FPS to 158 FPS on the 7700X, and from 167 to 181 FPS on the 9700X, for example. Even side by side, it’s an increase that will be difficult for most people to see. Other kinds of workloads may benefit, too—AMD said that the Procyon Office benchmark ran about 6 percent faster under Windows 11 24H2—but we don’t have definitive data on real-world workloads yet.

We wouldn’t expect performance to improve much, if at all, in either heavily multi-threaded workloads where all the CPU cores are actively engaged at once or in exclusively single-threaded workloads that run continuously on a single-core. AMD’s numbers for both single- and multi-threaded versions of the Cinebench benchmark, which simulates these kinds of workloads, were exactly the same in Windows 11 23H2 and 24H2 for Ryzen 9000.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the Ryzen 7 9700X was held back quite a bit by its new, lower 65 W TDP in our testing, compared to the 105 W TDP of the Ryzen 7 7700X. Both CPUs performed similarly in games Hardware Unboxed tested, both before and after the 24H2 update. But the 9700X is still the cooler and more efficient chip, and it’s capable of higher speeds if you either set its TDP to 105 W manually or use features like Precision Boost Overdrive to adjust its power limits. How both CPUs perform out of the box is important, but comparing the 9700X to the 7700X at stock settings is a worst-case scenario for Ryzen 9000’s generation-over-generation performance increases.

Windows 11 24H2: Coming soon but available now

Microsoft has disclosed a few details of the underpinnings of the 24H2 update, which looks the same as older Windows 11 releases but includes a new compiler, a new kernel, and a new scheduler under the hood. Microsoft talked about these specifically in the context of improving Arm CPU performance and the speed of translated x86 apps because it was gearing up to push Microsoft Surface devices and other Copilot+ PCs with new Qualcomm Snapdragon chips in them. Still, we’ll hopefully see some subtle benefits for other CPU architectures, too.

The 24H2 update is still technically a preview, available via Microsoft’s Windows Insider Release Preview channel. Users can either download it from Windows Update or as an ISO file if they want to make a USB installer to upgrade multiple systems. But Microsoft and PC OEMs have been shipping the 24H2 update on the Surfaces and other PCs for weeks now, and you shouldn’t have many problems with it in day-to-day use at this point. For those who would rather wait, the update should begin rolling out to the general public this fall.

Old and new Ryzen CPUs get a speed boost from optional Windows update Read More »

amd-explains,-promises-partial-fixes-for-ryzen-9000-performance-problems

AMD explains, promises partial fixes for Ryzen 9000 performance problems

We (and other testers) have had issues getting the Ryzen 9000 series to behave normally.

Enlarge / We (and other testers) have had issues getting the Ryzen 9000 series to behave normally.

Andrew Cunningham

AMD recently released its Ryzen 9000-series processors, which brought the company’s new Zen 5 CPU architecture to desktops for the first time. But we (and multiple other reviewers) had issues getting the chips’ performance to match up to AMD’s promises, something that the company wasn’t able to fully resolve before the processors launched to the public.

AMD has since put out statements explaining some of the discrepancies and promising at least partial fixes for some of them.

A Windows problem

The main fix for slower-than-expected game performance, the company says, will come with the Windows 11 24H2 update later this year, which will include “optimized AMD-specific branch prediction code” that improves Ryzen 9000’s performance by between 3 and 13 percent in an AMD-provided cross-section of games and benchmarks (though a handful of tests also showed no change). AMD says that these improvements will also benefit Zen 3- and Zen 4-based Ryzen processors, but that “the biggest boost” will be reserved for Ryzen 9000 and Zen 5.

Apparently, this branch prediction code improvement is already available in current Windows builds if you’re running games and apps in Administrator mode, which AMD used to run its tests. From AMD’s post, it’s unclear whether it was running games from within the normally disabled Administrator account, as has been reported elsewhere, or if it was merely running them in Administrator mode from within a standard user account.

In any case, even a standard user account with Administrator permissions spends most of its time running in a standard user mode, throwing up a User Account Control elevation message when Administrator privileges are needed for something. For security reasons, Windows only runs software in Administrator mode when it’s required, generally to install an app for the first time or make other system-wide changes. Virtually no one will be running games with Administrator privileges or while logged in as Administrator, which makes it an odd testing choice. Regardless, the 24H2 update should make those branch prediction improvements available to standard user accounts running in user mode.

The Windows 11 24H2 update should be released to the general public this fall, though Windows Insiders can also get it from the Insider Preview channel or by downloading an ISO. The 24H2 update is already the default version of Windows on Copilot+ PCs and on the Ryzen AI-powered Asus laptop we tested recently, so for most people it should be stable and reliable enough for day-to-day use.

There’s no word on whether or when these changes might come to Windows 10. But as with Intel’s Thread Director, which is not optimized for Windows 10, I wouldn’t count on AMD or Microsoft working very hard to bring significant performance improvements to a last-generation operating system that is just over a year away from its end-of-support date, even if it is still Steam’s most popular Windows version by a handful of percentage points.

AMD explains, promises partial fixes for Ryzen 9000 performance problems Read More »

for-the-second-time-in-two-years,-amd-blows-up-its-laptop-cpu-numbering-system

For the second time in two years, AMD blows up its laptop CPU numbering system

this again —

AMD reverses course on “decoder ring” numbering system for laptop CPUs.

AMD's Ryzen 9 AI 300 series is a new chip and a new naming scheme.

Enlarge / AMD’s Ryzen 9 AI 300 series is a new chip and a new naming scheme.

AMD

Less than two years ago, AMD announced that it was overhauling its numbering scheme for laptop processors. Each digit in its four-digit CPU model numbers picked up a new meaning, which, with the help of a detailed reference sheet, promised to inform buyers of exactly what it was they were buying.

One potential issue with this, as we pointed out at the time, was that this allowed AMD to change over the first and most important of those four digits every single year that it decided to re-release a processor, regardless of whether that chip actually included substantive improvements or not. Thus a “Ryzen 7730U” from 2023 would look two generations newer than a Ryzen 5800U from 2021, despite being essentially identical.

AMD is partially correcting this today by abandoning the self-described “decoder ring” naming system and resetting it to something more conventional.

For its new Ryzen AI laptop processors, codenamed “Strix Point,” AMD is still using the same broad Ryzen 3/5/7/9 number to communicate general performance level plus a one- or two-letter suffix to denote general performance and power level (U for ultraportables, HX for higher-performance chips, and so on). A new three-digit processor number will inform buyers of the chip’s generation in the first digit and denote the specific SKU using the last two digits.

AMD is changing how it numbers its laptop CPUs again.

Enlarge / AMD is changing how it numbers its laptop CPUs again.

AMD

In other words, the company is essentially hitting the undo button.

Like Intel, AMD is shifting from four-digit numbers to three digits. The Strix Point processor numbers will start with the 300 series, which AMD says is because this is the third generation of Ryzen laptop processors with a neural processing unit (NPU) included. Current 7040-series and 8040-series processors with NPUs are not being renamed retroactively, and AMD plans to stop using the 7000- and 8000-series numbering for processor introductions going forward.

AMD wouldn’t describe exactly how it would approach CPU model numbers for new products that used older architectures but did say that new processors that didn’t meet the 40+ TOPS requirement for Microsoft’s Copilot+ program would simply use the “Ryzen” name instead of the new “Ryzen AI” branding. That would include older architectures with slower NPUs, like the current 7040 and 8040-series chips.

Desktop CPUs are, once again, totally unaffected by this change. Desktop processors’ four-digit model numbers and alphabetic suffixes generally tell you all you need to know about their underlying architecture; the new Ryzen 9000 desktop CPUs and the Zen 5 architecture were also announced today.

It seems like a lot of work to do to end up basically where we started, especially when the people at AMD who make and market the desktop chips have been getting by just fine with older model numbers for newly released products when appropriate. But to be fair to AMD, there just isn’t a great way to do processor model numbers in a simple and consistent way, at least not given current market realities:

  • PC OEMs that seem to demand or expect “new” product from chipmakers every year, even though chip companies tend to take somewhere between one and three years to release significantly updated designs.
  • The fact that casual and low-end users don’t actually benefit a ton from performance enhancements, keeping older chips viable for longer.
  • Different subsections of the market that must be filled with slightly different chips (consider chips with vPro versus similar chips without it).
  • The need to “bin” chips—that is, disable small parts of a given silicon CPU or GPU die and then sell the results as a lower-end product—to recoup manufacturing costs and minimize waste.

Apple may come the closest to what the “ideal” would probably be—one number for the overarching chip generation (M1, M3, etc.), one word like “Pro” or “Max” to communicate the general performance level, and a straightforward description of the number of CPU and GPU cores included, to leave flexibility for binning chips. But as usual, Apple occupies a unique position: it’s the only company putting its own processors into its own systems, and the company usually only updates a product when there’s something new to put in it, rather than reflexively announcing new models every time another CES or back-to-school season or Windows version rolls around.

In reverting to more traditional model numbers, AMD has at least returned to a system that people who follow CPUs will be broadly familiar with. It’s not perfect, and it leaves plenty of room for ambiguity as the product lineup gets more complicated. But it’s in the same vein as Intel’s rebranding of 13th-gen Core chips, the whole “Intel Processor” thing, or Qualcomm’s unfriendly eight-digit model numbers for its Snapdragon X Plus and Elite chips. AMD’s new nomenclature is a devil, but at least it’s one we know.

For the second time in two years, AMD blows up its laptop CPU numbering system Read More »

amd’s-next-gen-ryzen-9000-desktop-chips-and-the-zen-5-architecture-arrive-in-july

AMD’s next-gen Ryzen 9000 desktop chips and the Zen 5 architecture arrive in July

ryzen again —

But AMD says AM4 will hang around for budget PCs well into 2025.

  • AMD is announcing Ryzen 9000 and Zen 5, the second CPU architecture for its AM5 platform.

    AMD

  • AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X heads up the new Ryzen 9000 family.

    AMD

  • There are three other variants here, with 12, 8, and 6 Zen 5 CPU cores. The Ryzen 7000 series launched with chips at the same tiers.

    AMD

  • AMD is also announcing a pair of high-end chipsets, though they don’t offer much that’s new; 600-series boards should all support Ryzen 9000 after a BIOS update.

    AMD

  • The Zen 5 CPU architecture powers the Ryzen 9000 series.

    AMD

  • A handful of architectural highlights from Zen 5.

    AMD

  • The performance improvements with Zen 5 are occasionally quite impressive, but on average we’re looking at a 16 percent increase over Zen 4 at the same clock speeds. That’s decent, but not as good as the move from Zen 3 to Zen 4.

    AMD

It’s been almost two years since AMD introduced its Ryzen 7000 series desktop CPUs and the Zen 4 CPU architecture. Today, AMD is announcing the first concrete details about their successors. The Ryzen 9000 CPUs begin shipping in July.

At a high level, the Ryzen 9000 series and Zen 5 architecture offer mostly incremental improvements over Ryzen 7000 (Ryzen 8000 on the desktop is used exclusively for Zen 4-based G-series CPUs with more powerful integrated GPUs). AMD says that Zen 5 is roughly 16 percent faster than Zen 4 at the same clock speeds, depending on the workload—certainly not nothing, and there are some workloads that perform much better. But that number is far short of the 29 percent jump between Zen 3 and Zen 4.

AMD and Intel have both compensated for mild single-core performance improvements in the past by adding more cores, but Ryzen 9000 doesn’t do that. From the 9600X to the 9950X, the chips offer between 6 and 16 full-size Zen 5 cores, the same as every desktop lineup since Zen 2 and the Ryzen 3000 series. De-lidded shots of the processors indicate that they’re still using a total of two or three separate chiplets: one or two CPU chiplets with up to 8 cores each, and a separate I/O die to handle connectivity. The CPU chiplets are manufactured on a TSMC N4 process, an upgrade from the 5nm process used for Ryzen 7000, while the I/O die is still made with a 6nm TSMC process.

Ryzen 9000 has the same layout as the last few generations of Ryzen desktop CPU—two CPU chiplets with up to eight cores each, and an I/O die to handle connectivity.

Enlarge / Ryzen 9000 has the same layout as the last few generations of Ryzen desktop CPU—two CPU chiplets with up to eight cores each, and an I/O die to handle connectivity.

AMD

These chips include no Zen 5c E-cores, as older rumors suggested. Zen 5c is a version of Zen 5 that is optimized to take up less space in a silicon die, at the expense of higher clock speeds; Zen 5c cores are making their debut in the Ryzen AI 300-series laptop chips AMD also announced today. Boosting the number of E-cores has helped Intel match and surpass AMD’s multi-core performance, though Ryzen’s power consumption and efficiency have both outdone Intel’s throughout the 12th-, 13th-, and 14th-generation Core product cycles. Apple also uses a mix of P-cores and E-cores in its  high-end desktop CPU designs.

Ryzen 9000 doesn’t include any kind of neural processing unit (NPU), nor does AMD mention whether the Ryzen 7000’s RDNA 2-based integrated GPU has been upgraded or improved.

AMD is also announcing new X870 and X870E motherboard chipsets to accompany the new processors; as with the X670, the E-series chipset is actually a pair of chipsets on the same motherboard, boosting the number of available USB ports, M.2 slots, and PCIe slots.

The only real improvement here seems to be that all X870-series boards support USB4 and higher EXPO memory overclocking speeds by default. The chipsets also support PCIe 5.0 speeds for the main PCIe slot and M.2 slot, though the X670 chipsets already did this.

The processors’ power requirements aren’t changing, so users with 600-series motherboards ought to be able to use Ryzen 9000 CPUs with little to no performance penalty following a BIOS update.

  • AMD plans to keep the AM4 socket around as a budget platform until at least 2025, according to this slide.

    AMD

  • To that end, it’s announcing a couple more riffs on the old Zen 3-based Ryzen 5000 series, to entice budget builders and upgraders. Pricing hasn’t been announced.

    AMD

Ryzen 9000 doesn’t seem likely to resolve the biggest issues with the AM5 platform, namely the high costs relative to current-gen Intel systems, the high cost relative to AM4-based systems today, and even the high cost relative to AM4-based systems at the same point in the AM4 socket’s lifespan. Motherboards remain more expensive, DDR5 memory remains more expensive, and there are still no AM5 processors available for significantly less than $200.

According to AMD’s own timeline, it plans to keep the AM4 socket around until at least 2025. AM4 is still a surprisingly decent budget platform given that the socket was introduced eight years ago, and AMD does, in fact, continue to trickle out new Ryzen 5000-series CPUs to give buyers and upgrades more options. But it still means that system builders either need to choose between an expensive platform that has a future or a cheaper platform that’s more or less a dead end.

Listing image by AMD

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ryzen-8000g-review:-an-integrated-gpu-that-can-beat-a-graphics-card,-for-a-price

Ryzen 8000G review: An integrated GPU that can beat a graphics card, for a price

The most interesting thing about AMD's Ryzen 7 8700G CPU is the Radeon 780M GPU that's attached to it.

Enlarge / The most interesting thing about AMD’s Ryzen 7 8700G CPU is the Radeon 780M GPU that’s attached to it.

Andrew Cunningham

Put me on the short list of people who can get excited about the humble, much-derided integrated GPU.

Yes, most of them are afterthoughts, designed for office desktops and laptops that will spend most of their lives rendering 2D images to a single monitor. But when integrated graphics push forward, it can open up possibilities for people who want to play games but can only afford a cheap desktop (or who have to make do with whatever their parents will pay for, which was the big limiter on my PC gaming experience as a kid).

That, plus an unrelated but accordant interest in building small mini-ITX-based desktops, has kept me interested in AMD’s G-series Ryzen desktop chips (which it sometimes calls “APUs,” to distinguish them from the Ryzen CPUs). And the Ryzen 8000G chips are a big upgrade from the 5000G series that immediately preceded them (this makes sense, because as we all know the number 8 immediately follows the number 5).

We’re jumping up an entire processor socket, one CPU architecture, three GPU architectures, and up to a new generation of much faster memory; especially for graphics, it’s a pretty dramatic leap. It’s an integrated GPU that can credibly beat the lowest tier of currently available graphics cards, replacing a $100–$200 part with something a lot more energy-efficient.

As with so many current-gen Ryzen chips, still-elevated pricing for the socket AM5 platform and the DDR5 memory it requires limit the 8000G series’ appeal, at least for now.

From laptop to desktop

AMD's first Ryzen 8000 desktop processors are what the company used to call

Enlarge / AMD’s first Ryzen 8000 desktop processors are what the company used to call “APUs,” a combination of a fast integrated GPU and a reasonably capable CPU.

AMD

The 8000G chips use the same Zen 4 CPU architecture as the Ryzen 7000 desktop chips, but the way the rest of the chip is put together is pretty different. Like past APUs, these are actually laptop silicon (in this case, the Ryzen 7040/8040 series, codenamed Phoenix and Phoenix 2) repackaged for a desktop processor socket.

Generally, the real-world impact of this is pretty mild; in most ways, the 8700G and 8600G will perform a lot like any other Zen 4 CPU with the same number of cores (our benchmarks mostly bear this out). But to the extent that there is a difference, the Phoenix silicon will consistently perform just a little worse, because it has half as much L3 cache. AMD’s Ryzen X3D chips revolve around the performance benefits of tons of cache, so you can see why having less would be detrimental.

The other missing feature from the Ryzen 7000 desktop chips is PCI Express 5.0 support—Ryzen 8000G tops out at PCIe 4.0. This might, maybe, one day in the distant future, eventually lead to some kind of user-observable performance difference. Some recent GPUs use an 8-lane PCIe 4.0 interface instead of the typical 16 lanes, which limits performance slightly. But PCIe 5.0 SSDs remain rare (and PCIe 4.0 peripherals remain extremely fast), so it probably shouldn’t top your list of concerns.

The Ryzen 5 8500G is a lot different from the 8700G and 8600G, since some of the CPU cores in the Phoenix 2 chips are based on Zen 4c rather than Zen 4. These cores have all the same capabilities as regular Zen 4 ones—unlike Intel’s E-cores—but they’re optimized to take up less space rather than hit high clock speeds. They were initially made for servers, where cramming lots of cores into a small amount of space is more important than having a smaller number of faster cores, but AMD is also using them to make some of its low-end consumer chips physically smaller and presumably cheaper to produce. AMD didn’t send us a Ryzen 8500G for review, so we can’t see exactly how Phoenix 2 stacks up in a desktop.

The 8700G and 8600G chips are also the only ones that come with AMD’s “Ryzen AI” feature, the brand AMD is using to refer to processors with a neural processing unit (NPU) included. Sort of like GPUs or video encoding/decoding blocks, these are additional bits built into the chip that handle things that CPUs can’t do very efficiently—in this case, machine learning and AI workloads.

Most PCs still don’t have NPUs, and as such they are only barely used in current versions of Windows (Windows 11 offers some webcam effects that will take advantage of NPU acceleration, but for now that’s mostly it). But expect this to change as they become more common and as more AI-accelerated text, image, and video creating and editing capabilities are built into modern operating systems.

The last major difference is the GPU. Ryzen 7000 includes a pair of RDNA2 compute units that perform more or less like Intel’s desktop integrated graphics: good enough to render your desktop on a monitor or two, but not much else. The Ryzen 8000G chips include up to 12 RDNA3 CUs, which—as we’ve already seen in laptops and portable gaming systems like the Asus ROG Ally that use the same silicon—is enough to run most games, if just barely in some cases.

That gives AMD’s desktop APUs a unique niche. You can use them in cases where you can’t afford a dedicated GPU—for a time during the big graphics card shortage in 2020 and 2021, a Ryzen 5700G was actually one of the only ways to build a budget gaming PC. Or you can use them in cases where a dedicated GPU won’t fit, like super-small mini ITX-based desktops.

The main argument that AMD makes is the affordability one, comparing the price of a Ryzen 8700G to the price of an Intel Core i5-13400F and a GeForce GTX 1650 GPU (this card is nearly five years old, but it remains Nvidia’s newest and best GPU available for less than $200).

Let’s check on performance first, and then we’ll revisit pricing.

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