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
I can feel this whole platform will cost a heck of a lot.
As a cost-cutting (that actually gets passed to consumers) PCI-E 5.0 for the NVME and CPU->chipset link is all that will matter for quite some time to come.
It could lead to cheaper pricing on higher SKU. Doing the 16 core parts was already hard for AMD. They had to use the same amount of power than the 8 core parts but also get higher clock. That was not an easy limitation to go around.
And most people just tried to push PBO to the max to get the best auto OC anyway.
They also plan to reuse the chipset for many generation and it's not impossible that we will see higher core count in the future.
In the end i think they are just taking the same headroom as intel. Why not,
couldn't help it
No AM4 chips get even close to 200W stock and AM5 looks to be no different, with 230W only there as overclocking headroom, as opposed to selling a factory-overclocked CPU that draws 300W and requires a top of the line cooler just to run normally.
AMD Bulldozer architecture was blamed to consume more while loosing. But for Alder Lake, people do not care that much about the power usage since it's winning. They cared about it on Rocket Lake since it was not enough.
People vote with their money and they voted that power consumption do not matter if you have a slight advantage vs your opponent.