Products You May Like
At Computex in Taipei, AMD has pulled the wraps off the first processors featuring its Zen 5 architecture. The company is unveiling six Zen 5 processors at the show, with the initial lineup consisting of four new desktop chips and two mobile CPUs with a hybrid design made for AI PCs. The company is also announcing two newly branded 5000XT-series CPUs for its previous AM4 socket, so there’s something for everyone in this announcement. AMD definitively stated it will support AM5 through the year 2027.
The juiciest bit of info in the Zen 5 reveal is that AMD is claiming its new architecture offers an average boost to instructions per clock (IPC) over Zen 4 of 16%, which is about what is expected for a generation-to-generation cycle without major hardware revisions or a big node jump. This seems to confirm AMD hasn’t moved from the 5nm node it used for Zen 4 7000-series to a 3nm process, but that’s just a guess on our part. It is likely using a 4nm node instead, confirming previous rumors. It is currently using TSMC 4nm for its Zen 4 8000-series CPUs.
Zen 5’s boost over Zen 4 really depends on the applications you’re using.
Credit: AMD
This IPC gain might disappoint some people, as there was a lot of hype for Zen 5, and some people were predicting it would be 30%, such as Jim Keller. However, it’s very much in the ballpark of what can be expected from a revamped architecture like Zen 5, where core counts are kept intact from the previous generation. At the same time, AMD is also claiming huge AI performance gains with its second-generation XDNA2 neural processing unit (NPU) for its mobile chips. All these Zen 5 CPUs will be available in July, though pricing is currently TBD.
AMD has really improved efficiency with Zen 5, with only the flagship offering a 170W TDP.
Credit: AMD
AMD is announcing four new desktop CPUs comprising the Ryzen 9000 series launch. The basic specs of these CPUs are as follows:
-
The flagship CPU is the Ryzen 9 9950X, which sports 16 cores, 32 threads, 80MB of L2 and L3 cache, a 170W TDP, and a 5.7GHz maximum boost clock.
-
The Ryzen 9 9900X has 12 cores, 24 threads, 76MB of cache, a 5.6GHz boost clock, and a 120W TDP.
-
The Ryzen 7 9700X has eight cores, 16 threads, 40MB of cache, a 5.5GHz boost clock, and a 65W TDP.
-
The Ryzen 5 9600X has six cores, 12 threads, 38MB of cache, a 5.4GHz boost clock, and a 65W TDP.
AMD only provides benchmarks for the 9950X compared with the Intel Core i9-14900K CPU, stating it’s faster in both gaming and content creation. For example, its gaming advantage over Intel’s CPU ranges from 4% in Borderlands 3 to 23% in Horizon Zero Dawn. In content creation, it’s more powerful than Intel’s chip, with a spread of 7% in Procyon Office up to 56% in Blender. AMD also says the 9950X is 20% faster in tokens per second LLM training using Mistral.
AMD claims its Ryzen 9 9950X beats the 14900K in both content creation and gaming despite offering lower boost clocks.
Credit: AMD
The company isn’t doing a deep dive on Zen 5 right now, as it wants to generate excitement instead of putting everyone to sleep with circuit talk. However, it reveals that Zen 5 has several upgrades under the hood, including improved branch prediction accuracy and a deeper window size across the design to promote enhanced parallelism. It offers higher throughput within the chip thanks to wider pipelines and vectors. AMD also says Zen 5 offers “up to” 2x uplift for instruction bandwidth on the front end, much improved AI and AVX512 performance, and increased data bandwidth as data moves in and out of cache.
Tying all this together will be upgraded AMD X870 and X870E (extreme) chipsets. The new chipsets will have many features in common, including USB 4, PCIe Gen 5 for both the GPU and M.2 storage, and higher EXPO memory clocks, though AMD doesn’t say what the ceiling is for this feature.
These new CPUs will work fine in existing X670(E) and other AM5 motherboards, but X870(E) will appeal to overclockers.
Credit: AMD
AMD is also introducing two new mobile CPUs comprising the Ryzen AI 300 series. The huge news here is that both CPUs feature a hybrid design in an AMD mobile processor for the first time, and they have a heavily upgraded NPU. AMD says its new NPU is capable of 50 TOPS performance, which would make it the most potent NPU available. The NPU in the Qualcomm X Elite is listed at 45 TOPS, according to Qualcomm. The basic specs of these CPUs are as follows:
-
The flagship CPU is the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, which has 12 cores in a 4/8 design, with four Zen 5 cores and eight Zen 5c (efficiency) cores. This design offers 24 threads, a 5.1GHz boost clock, a 50 TOPS NPU, and an RDNA 3.5 GPU with the Radeon 890M, which has 16 compute units (CU).
-
The Ryzen AI 9 365 has 10 cores divided between four Zen 5 and six Zen 5c cores. This provides 20 threads, a 5GHz boost clock, 34MB of cache, a 50 TOPS NPU, and RDNA 3.5 GPU with the Radeon 880M with 12 CUs.
Overall, AMD is leaning heavily on NPU performance, as laptops with these chips will be included in the officially recognized group of AI PCs being promoted by Microsoft. As you may recall, the first batch of these PCs will be available shortly, and they are all powered by Qualcomm’s X Elite CPU.
AMD claims its 50 TOPS performance will outpace the 45 TOPS NPU of the X Elite chip and the estimated 45 TOPS Intel will bring to the table with its upcoming mobile platform, Lunar Lake. According to AMD, Apple’s M4 SoC is estimated to provide just 38 TOPS. For reference, the existing Ryzen 8000-series NPU is capable of 16 TOPS, and Intel’s Meteor Lake NPU can do around 10-11 TOPS.
AMD’s Ryzen 9 AI 300 series for Copilot+PCs are hybrid CPUs, aiming to take on Intel, Apple, and Qualcomm
Credit: AMD
AMD’s benchmarks show the company wants to dethrone Qualcomm’s X Elite CPU, boasting its NPU is better by several metrics, including AI responsiveness, graphics, multitasking, and productivity. The cherry on top of the announcement is that AMD will be joining the ranks of AI PCs via laptops, which will launch in July from partners such as Asus, MSI, HP, Lenovo, Dell, and HP.
AM4 Is Not Forgotten
Finally, AMD is also announcing the Ryzen 5000XT series for AM4, which includes two new CPUs: the Ryzen 9 5900XT and the Ryzen 7 5800XT. They offer 16 cores and 32 threads in the 5900XT and eight cores and 16 threads in the 5800XT, with pricing being TBD for now. AMD compares these processors with Intel’s Core i5 and i7 13th Gen chips, with benchmarks showing them to be almost the same across a wide range of tests—making us think AMD is saying you can get the same performance but for less money with AMD.
It’s surprising AMD is sandwiching two AM4 CPUs into its Zen 5 launch but it’s good news for socket holdouts.
Credit: AMD
This concludes AMD’s announcements for the first day of Computex, so there are still several unanswered questions. For desktop CPUs, it’s unknown what the pricing will be for the new Ryzen CPUs and when the V-Cache versions will be announced.
On the mobile side, it’s a bit surprising that AMD is coming to market with only two CPUs, but that strategy mirrors Qualcomm’s efforts with the Snapdragon X platform since it comes in just Elite or Plus. As we know, Apple has three SKUS for M3: regular, Pro, and Max, though the M4 is just a single SKU for now.
AMD is comparing its new Zen 5 CPUs with existing Intel products, but Intel is expected to launch Lunar Lake this year, which will compete with AMD’s latest CPUs for mobile supremacy. Intel is also anticipated to launch an all-new desktop platform later this year with Arrow Lake, which will battle Zen 5 for bragging rights in the gaming PC slash content creator space.
Suffice to say, the end of this year is going to be incredibly spicy as Intel and AMD renew their long-running blood feud for top-dog status. The mobile side will be especially explosive, with a four-way battle between AMD, Intel, Apple, and Qualcomm for the fastest “AI PC” processor.