[Computex 2024] AMD Announces Ryzen 9000, Ryzen AI 300 Series & X870 Motherboards

Meet Ryzen 9000, X870, Ryzen 5000XT & Ryzen AI 300

Ryzen Desktop

AMD is kicking off its Computex announcements today with plenty of new hardware, and in this article we’ll focus on the consumer side of things. Team Red’s CPU department has plenty of announcements this week, set to be powered by the latest Zen 5 architecture encompassing Ryzen 9000 Series desktop processors and Ryzen AI 300 Series laptop APUs. The company is also introducing new X870 series motherboards, as well as Socket AM4 refreshes in the form of Ryzen 5000XT series.

Starting off with Ryzen 9000 – the new lineup will continue using Socket AM5, meaning all existing motherboards with the AMD 600 series chipset should work right away (or after a BIOS update). On the core level, Zen 5’s improvements include improved branch prediction accuracy and latency, wider pipelines, and increased parallelism – netting an overall 16% increase in instructions per clock (IPC) over Zen 4.

The lineup starts off with the new flagship, the 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X. Outside of the core, most of the CPU specs remain unchanged, meaning you get 16 cores, 32 threads, a 5.7GHz boost clock, 64MB L3 cache, and a TDP of 170W. AMD pits the chip against Intel’s top desktop chip today – the Core i9-14900K – which nets itself a multicore advantage of 21% in Cinebench, but the figures go as high as 56% in Handbrake and Blender. As for gaming, AMD measures 4% to 23% improvement over the Core i9.

Aside from Ryzen 9 9950X, there are three more SKUs in the Ryzen 9000 lineup and it’s generally similar in terms of specs, apart from one: TDP. Ryzen 7000 chips uses quite a bit more power than the preceding generation, with 16/12-core SKUs consuming 170W while the 8/6-core models guzzle 105W of power. That has changed – now, only the 9950X uses full 170W, while the 9900X will now stick to 120W TDP. Both the 9700X and 9600X will stick to just 65W of TDP, which should make the 8-core model especially efficient over Intel’s equivalents.

With new CPUs come new motherboards – this time around, we have the new AMD X870 series that skips the number 700 (probably the same reason why Ryzen AI gets renamed last minute), and AMD has pushed the standard even higher for these high-end motherboards. For one, USB4 is mandatory; GPU and SSDs will use PCIe 5.0, and these models must enable higher EXPO memory overclocking support.

AMD has also gone on the record stating that Socket AM5 will last for years to come: while future Zen generations were not mentioned, the chipmaker says it will continue to design new CPUs for Socket AM5 at least until 2027 – which will be 5 years since the original AM5 release in September 2022. If Socket AM4 is any indication, we think AM5 will last for a good while. Speaking of which…

Yes, Socket AM4 continues to be a gift that keeps on giving for almost 8 years by now – and AMD has two more models to deliver in the form of Ryzen 9 5900XT and Ryzen 7 5800XT. Both chips uses 105W TDP, and has standard cache layout; the 5800XT also comes included with Wraith Prism RGB stock cooler to sweeten the deal (especially as the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is insanely powerful in gaming for the price). These chips are expected to be competitive against Intel’s Core i7-13700K and Core i5-13600KF, according to AMD’s benchmarks.

Ryzen Mobile

Up next, we have new Ryzen laptop chips. AMD is putting heavy focus on AI this time around – so much so, it’s renaming the entire lineup with the new “Ryzen AI” branding instead, while the new naming system is arguably even worse than before. Two chips are showcased today, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and Ryzen AI 9 365, both with 50 TOPS NPU that should qualify for Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC certification.

So, let’s decode the new naming: The “Ryzen AI” part of the name is part of the new branding and AMD says this is the 3rd generation of Ryzen laptop APUs featuring Ryzen AI; the “HX” part is now brand level, as the chipmaker does away with model number suffixes that used to indicated TDP ranges. Why? AMD says all Ryzen AI chips will be configurable between 15-54W of TDP, and it’s up to the laptop makers to decide how much power is needed on their designs.

Hence, this meant the “9 HX” is now the highest-end model of the product stack, while the standard “9” sits below it. This will be reflected in the badge, which should make it easy to tell both chips apart. Finally, the number drops one digit down to three: ‘3’ now indicates the series, while the ’70’ or ’65’ is now simply the SKU numbers, with no digit to indicate which Zen generation is powering the cores.

Naming aside, the new Ryzen AI 300 series does bring new components across the board, including Zen 5 core, RDNA 3.5 onboard graphics (under the Radeon 800M series branding), and XDNA 2-based NPU. AMD’s benchmarks are competing against all three other laptop chipmakers, including Intel, Apple, and Snapdragon – and it looks like multi-core and graphics performance are Ryzen AI’s strong suits. The first laptops featuring Ryzen AI will come from Acer, ASUS, HP, Lenovo, and MSI, with 100+ models available starting July 2024.

Pokdepinion: The Ryzen AI branding is admittedly a bit confusing. Ryzen 8000 used the same badge too!