Two years ago, at Computex 2022, AMD unveiled new Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 processors and the Socket AM5 platform, the company"s first LGA (line grid array) consumer socket. Zen 4 brought about several improvements and AMD claimed an average IPC (instructions per cycle/clock) gain of 13%. AMD was mostly right in those claims as third-party media reviews found out later.
Today, at Computex 2024, the company is unveiling the succeeding Zen 5, and this time, AMD is promising even higher performance per clock. Ryzen 9000 series is the traditional desktop lineup while AMD is also simultaneously debuting its new "Ryzen AI" 300 series of CPUs aimed towards Copilot+ AI PCs.
According to the company, Zen 5 will have an average IPC uplift of 16%. This was calculated as the geometric mean (Geomean) across various workloads with the biggest gain on AES-XTS performance which can lead to huge gains on upcoming Windows 11 version 24H2 that is expected to be BitLocker-encrypted by default.
AMD says the performance gain has been achieved thanks to upgrades to branch prediction accuracy and latency. Multi-threading and parallel processing also see gains due to increased throughput achieved with the help of wider vector and pipeline implementations coupled with deeper window sizes. All this, AMD says, leads to a doubling of the instruction bandwidth, data bandwidth, and AI and AVX512 throughput.
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Based on leaked spec details and chipset support information, we already knew AMD was going for the "Ryzen 9000" naming scheme, though we also later learned that the company was working on a new X870 chipset instead of X770. It alongside X870E has also been unveiled today.
The company hasn"t forgotten about AM4 owners either as it has a couple of new products in the form of the "Ryzen 5000XT" series.
The good thing is that AMD will continue using the same naming scheme as with previous generation models. First up, we have the flagship Ryzen 9 9950X which has 16 cores and 32 threads, and packs 80MB of cache across level 2 (L2) and level 3 (L3) (16 MB L2 + 64 MB L3). Hence, it looks like the overall chip layout is not going to be different than what we had with Ryzen 7000 series. This is also reflected in the rest of the lineup as well which comprises the 12-core 24-thread 9900X, 8-core 16-thread 9700X, and 6-core 12-thread 9600X.
AMD says its processor is better than Intel"s i9-14900K at both gaming as well as productivity. The most impressive thing AMD says is the performance jump the 9950X will have on certain creative workloads like Handbrake and Blender. This means users who do lots of video production or rendering can see huge benefits with these chips, provided Team Red is not over-stating its performance figures here.
AMD also says 9950X is around 20% faster at AI performance and has double the PCIe bandwidth of 14900K during simultaneous graphics and storage operations.
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As far as availability is concerned, AMD expects all four Ryzen 9000 series SKUs to be on the shelf in July. The company is also tight-lipped on pricing and says it will be announced closer to retail availability.
You can check out our entire Computex 2024 coverage in these articles here.