zen 5c

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

AMD, Ryzen, ryzen 7000, ryzen 9000, Tech, Zen 4, zen 5, zen 5c / Ari B / June 3, 2024

ryzen again —

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

Andrew Cunningham – Jun 3, 2024 3: 00 am UTC

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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AMD intros Ryzen AI 300 chips with Zen 5, better GPU, and hugely improved NPU

ai everywhere —

High-end Ryzen laptop chips combine big and little Zen cores for the first time.

Andrew Cunningham – Jun 3, 2024 3: 00 am UTC

AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 series is its next-gen laptop platform, and the first to support Copilot+ PC features.

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Ryzen AI 300 uses a new CPU architecture, a revamped NPU, and a tweaked GPU architecture that AMD hasn’t said much about.

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Only two high-end processors will be available by July, though others will surely follow.

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How AMD’s new laptop CPU naming scheme applies to Ryzen AI 300.

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AMD’s next-generation laptop processors are coming later this year, joining new Ryzen 9000 desktop processors and ushering in yet another revamp to the way AMD does laptop CPU model numbers.

But the big thing the company wants to push is the new chips’ performance in generative AI and machine-learning workloads—it’s putting “Ryzen AI” right in the name and emphasizing the presence of an improved neural processing unit (NPU) that meets and exceeds Microsoft’s performance requirements for Copilot+ PCs. The new Ryzen AI 300-series, codenamed Strix Point, succeeds the Ryzen 8040 chips from earlier this year, which were themselves a relatively mild refresh for the Ryzen 7040 processors less than a year before.

AMD promises performance of up to 50 trillion operations per second (TOPS) with its new third-generation NPU, a significant boost from the 10 to 16 TOPS offered by Ryzen 7000 and 8000 processors with NPUs. This would make it faster than the 45 TOPS offered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus in the first wave of Copilot+ compatible PCs, and also Intel’s projected performance for its next-generation Core Ultra chips, codenamed Lunar Lake. All exceed Microsoft’s Copilot+ requirement of 40 TOPS, which enables some Windows 11 features that aren’t normally available on typical PCs. Copilot+ PCs can do more AI processing locally on device rather than relying on the cloud, potentially improving performance and giving users more privacy.

If you don’t particularly care about generative AI, locally executed or otherwise, the Ryzen AI 300 processors also come with an updated CPU based on the same Zen 5 architecture as the desktop chips, plus an “RDNA 3.5” integrated GPU to boost gaming performance for thin-and-light systems that can’t fit a dedicated graphics processor. The chips are being manufactured on a TSMC N4 process.

AMD is mostly talking about the performance of the new NPU, which at least according to AMD should slightly outperform offerings from Qualcomm and Intel.

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The new integrated GPUs stack up well against Intel’s current Arc GPUs, though how they perform against next-gen Lunar Lake-based chips is anyone’s guess.

AMD

AMD is announcing two chips today, both in the high-end Ryzen 9 series. The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 includes 12 CPU cores and 16 GPU cores, up from a maximum of eight CPU cores and 12 GPU cores for the Ryzen 8040 series. The Ryzen AI 9 365 steps down to 10 CPU cores and 12 GPU cores. Both have the same NPU onboard.

Though an increase in CPU core count suggests big improvements in multi-threaded performance, note that in both chips a majority of the CPU cores (8 in the 370, 6 in the 365) actually use the “Zen 5c” architecture, a variant of Zen 5 that supports the exact same instructions and features but is optimized for small size rather than high clock speeds. The result is essentially AMD’s version of one of Intel’s E-cores, though without the truly heterogeneous CPU architecture that has caused incompatibility problems with some apps and games.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a mix of big and small CPU cores from AMD, but it is the first time we’ve seen it at the high-end. Zen 4c cores only really showed up in lower-end, lower-power CPU designs in the Ryzen 3 and 5 and Ryzen Z1 families.

Perhaps tellingly, AMD offered no direct comparisons between the CPU performance of the Ryzen AI 300 chips and the Ryzen 8040 series, opting instead to compare to offerings from Intel, Qualcomm, and Apple. This certainly doesn’t mean performance has regressed generation over generation, but it is usually code for “this isn’t the kind of improvement we want to draw attention to.”

AMD also didn’t offer performance comparisons between the new Radeon 890M and 880M and the old Radeon 780M. The company said that the 890M was an average of 36 percent faster in a small selection of games compared to the Intel Arc integrated GPU in the Meteor Lake Core Ultra chips and 60 percent faster than the Snapdragon X Elite in the 3DMark Night Raid benchmark (this was part of a slide that was specifically highlighting the performance impact of translating x86 code on Arm chips, though for the time being it’s true that the vast majority of games running on Snapdragon PCs will have to deal with the overhead of code translation).

AMD says that the Ryzen AI chips are slated to appear in “100+ platforms from OEMs” starting in July 2024, a month or so after Microsoft and Qualcomm’s first wave of Snapdragon X-equipped Copilot+ PCs. Ryzen AI will also compete with Intel’s next-gen Lunar Lake chips, also due out sometime later this year.

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