After the Computex announcement, we finally have a date – the new AMD Ryzen 9000 series will be launching by July 31st, and the chipmaker has provided details for the lineup, including all the changes and upgrades that comes with it. Without further ado, here’s what to expect.
Ryzen 9000 Brings Zen 5: +16% IPC, Lower TDP
The biggest change of the Ryzen 9000 series is the new Zen 5 architecture, which AMD claims provides an average of 16% uplift in IPC (instructions per clock). The single-core improvement is also accompanied by lower TDP compared to the previous generation, with the exception of the 16-core model, which retains the same 170W TDP. On that note, here’s the lineup launching later this month:
In terms of competition, AMD pits the Ryzen 9 9900X, Ryzen 7 9700X, and Ryzen 5 9600X against their counterparts, which is the Core i9-14900K, Core i7-14700K, and Core i5-14600K, respectively. AMD didn’t choose to compare its flagship Ryzen 9 9950X against Intel’s top dog this time, but it did when Ryzen 9000 was announced back in Computex, which shows stronger multi-core performance overall with all 16 full-sized cores on tap.
As far as gaming is concerned, AMD is enticing those with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D with the upgrade path to the Ryzen 7 9700X. There were rumors that Team Red wanted to released a second 8-core SKU with higher TDP to make sure it outperforms the current best, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, but no signs is pointing to such as far as official news goes. Still, pitting the 9700X against the oldest X3D chip on offer seems like an interesting choice – especially when Ryzen 9000X3D series is all but confirmed at this point.
However, one interesting info from the AMD’s announcement is the physical chip itself – it was said that in order to maintain cooler compatibility, Ryzen 7000 processors had to use extra height on the IHS (integrated heat spreader), which does sacrifice thermal transfer capabilities to some degree (no pun intended). The new IHS on the Ryzen 9000 will solve this, and the company claims this amounts up to 7°C reduction at the same TDP.
On the subject of power and heat, AMD has dropped the TDP targets for all but the 16-core flagship, while still delivering gen-on-gen improvements on all models. Based on Ryzen 9 9950X’s result though, +22% on Blender is what you can expect if you’re comparing two generations with equal amounts of TDP, so a PBO overclock should give the smaller chips extra oomph on multi-core workloads.
Moving away from the chips themselves, let’s talk about memory and I/O. For Ryzen 9000, AMD has raised the JEDEC RAM speed to 5600MT/s, though as mentioned before, the sweet spot lies on DDR5-6000, or likely DDR5-6400 as well for some well-binned chips.
Additionally, AMD is also bringing Curve Shaper, an add-on feature based on the Curve Optimizer feature available on Ryzen 7000 CPUs today. Essentially, Curve Shaper enables finer tuning on how the cores can be undervolted to maximize efficiency and performance (by using the extra thermal headroom provided from the undervolt).
AMD 800 Series Chipset
For motherboards, AMD has reshuffled the lineup a bit to now include a new chipset called B840. This acts as the entry-level offering for budget PC builders that don’t need the latest standards or overclocking capabilities, which should help push the cost down. On the higher end, the mid-range B850 no longer has the Extreme counterpart like the B650E, and instead the designation will be reserved for the highest-end X870E chipset.
AMD is also keen to point out that its platform offers both PCIe 5.0 speeds on both the GPU and the SSD slots – while Intel currently forces you to choose one or the other. Of course, AI has to be involved here because investors love them, but we think this is not really a selling point today, especially given that no GPUs even support PCIe 5.0 speeds, nor any of them comes close to saturating the bandwidth (remember, PCIe 3.0 x16 was only maxed out by RTX 3090 which is still a relatively recent card).
Finally, while AMD does announce that all four Ryzen 9000 chips will be released globally by July 31, 2024, no prices has been announced at this point. You might have to wait for a week or two before pricing gets announced, so keep your eyes peeled if you’re getting one of these chips for your next build.
Pokdepinion: Quite surprising to see B840 to use PCIe 3.0 instead of PCIe 4.0 – isn’t PCIe 4.0 very mainstream at this point?
