Thursday, May 26th 2022
AMD Clarifies Ryzen 7000 "Zen 4" TDP and Power Limits: 170W TDP, 230W PPT
The mention of "170 W" in one of the slides of AMD's Computex 2022 reveal of the upcoming Ryzen 7000 "Zen 4" desktop processors, caused quite some confusion as to what that figure meant. AMD issued a structured clarification on the matter, laying to rest the terminology associated with it. Apparently, there will be certain SKUs of Socket AM5 processors with TDP of 170 W. This would be the same classical definition of TDP that AMD has been consistently using. The package-power tracking (PPT), a figure that translates as power limit for the socket, is 230 W.
This does not necessarily mean that there will be a Ryzen 7000-series SKU with 170 W TDP. AMD plans to give AM5 a similar life-cycle to AM4, which is now spanning five generations of Ryzen processors, and the 170 W TDP and 230 W PPT figures only denote design goals for the socket. AMD, in a statement, explained why it needed to make AM5 capable of delivering much higher power than AM4 could—to enable higher CPU core-counts in the future, more on-package hardware, and for new capabilities like power-hungry instruction-sets (think AVX-512). AMD has been calculating PPT as 1.35 times TDP, since the very first generation of Ryzen chips. For a 105 W TDP processor, this means 140 W PPT, and the same formula continues with Ryzen 7000 series (230 W is 1.35x 170 W).
The AMD statement follows.
This does not necessarily mean that there will be a Ryzen 7000-series SKU with 170 W TDP. AMD plans to give AM5 a similar life-cycle to AM4, which is now spanning five generations of Ryzen processors, and the 170 W TDP and 230 W PPT figures only denote design goals for the socket. AMD, in a statement, explained why it needed to make AM5 capable of delivering much higher power than AM4 could—to enable higher CPU core-counts in the future, more on-package hardware, and for new capabilities like power-hungry instruction-sets (think AVX-512). AMD has been calculating PPT as 1.35 times TDP, since the very first generation of Ryzen chips. For a 105 W TDP processor, this means 140 W PPT, and the same formula continues with Ryzen 7000 series (230 W is 1.35x 170 W).
"AMD would like to issue a correction to the socket power and TDP limits of the upcoming AMD Socket AM5. AMD Socket AM5 supports up to a 170 W TDP with a PPT up to 230 W. TDP*1.35 is the standard calculation for TDP v. PPT for AMD sockets in the "Zen" era, and the new 170 W TDP group is no exception (170*1.35=229.5).
This new TDP group will enable considerably more compute performance for high core count CPUs in heavy compute workloads, which will sit alongside the 65 W and 105 W TDP groups that Ryzen is known for today. AMD takes great pride in providing the enthusiast community with transparent and forthright product capabilities, and we want to take this opportunity to apologize for our error and any subsequent confusion we may have caused on this topic."
33 Comments on AMD Clarifies Ryzen 7000 "Zen 4" TDP and Power Limits: 170W TDP, 230W PPT
a correction to Robert Hallock, in the PCWorld interview he clearly mentioned 170W PPT, lol he didn't even have clear in his mind what the TDP/PPT figures were?
Turbo: 170W
Socket: 230W (overclocking and future)
Intel has improved in this department with Alder Lake, but previous generations were awful by comparison.
At this point we don't know anything about Zen 4's performance - it could have the highest perf/watt ever, or it could be AMD's Rocket Lake. People (in this thread even) are already saying higher power consumption is no big deal.
They can still release perfectly fine 65w, 95w, 105w or even 140w TDP based CPU's.
This will be interesting tho. See if a 50$ board handles a high end CPU.
FX line for example was rated for up to 25A on the 12V line or something, and with higher end boards you where able to override that with a additional 40% extra (35a max).
That only comes into play when your chasing records and using LN2. Knowing how accurate XFR is manual OC's won't yield that much anyway.
230W isn't unattainable for 2CCD Zen 3. It's just not very easy to cool and excludes pretty much everything outside of water, custom water, and full blast dual towers.
Robert said a lot about the exciting "5.5GHz" core clock, but as we all know on Zen 3 the exciting ST clock =! actual sustained ST clock =! MT clocks. We'll see. Zen 3 did offer big MT clock uplift with lower temps and lower volts over Zen 2, however, so it's not impossible even if N5 is dense.
It kinda seems he confirmed that we are going to have 65W/105W/170W options, at least that's how my interpretation of the below:
"The confusion stems from me misspeaking. I had misread some tech docs and got my wires crossed. Sorry to the community for that. :
Ryzen sockets are CPU_TDP*1.35 = PPT (maximum socket power).
So 65W TDP = 88W PPT (no change from AM4), 105W TDP = 142W PPT (no change), and 170W TDP = 230W PPT (new option)"
IF we are going to have something between 105-170W TDP, i don't have high expectations to be somewhere in the middle (135W TDP) since based on his comment:
"The Computex processor was a 16-core prototype sample not yet fused to specific power/TDP values, but it was operating in a range below the new 170W TDP group we've developed. It's a conservative figure."
He didn't say somewhere above 105W or a lot below 170W, or he could use the expression somewhere in the middle, combine that they already confirmed that they used Blender because it's free in order the community to be able to replicate the result and since the performance must be at least at Computex's level, the most probable scenario is that we are going to have a 16c 170W TDP option at launch (especially if there is an additional 105W option 16core part, because they would need to differentiate them)
They could do multiple TDP SKUs like in the past, but it may bring confusion to the market, but again 170W should be one of the two TDP options.
But its all about the return on investment isn't it? so no big deal...
It's the lying and falsifying numbers thats the issue.
This is just saying the max values for OCers and future CPU's, not that any of the regular chips will actually reach it.