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.
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 is announcing Ryzen 9000 and Zen 5, the second CPU architecture for its AM5 platform.
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AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X heads up the new Ryzen 9000 family.
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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.
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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.
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The Zen 5 CPU architecture powers the Ryzen 9000 series.
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A handful of architectural highlights from Zen 5.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
