Overall, this is a major disappointment and does not feel like the CPUs are worthy of a new architecture name. At best Zen4+
ST performance bump is ~12%, but it only translates to 5% MT advantage. The only notable improvement is that it's up to 9% faster than the 65W 7700, but in the end, you might as well just save the $80 and get the 7700 instead of 9700X.
AMD made a big mistake by not including their NPU in these, losing the only reason to recommend Zen5 over Zen4.
It is no Raptor Lake killer, that's for sure. I wouldn't call it a disappointment, it's just not the flawless, supremely performant architecture that many hyped it up to be. It seems most of the improvements are derived from its architectural improvements regarding cache associativity and execution width. Tasks which do not leverage these (which seem to be few right now, even in the niche of video encoding given that Raptor is still beating it in this workload) should perform roughly the same as Zen 4. For the price, I think AMD delivers on an unassuming upgrade after two years of Zen 4.
In other words... idk, buy it if you're building from scratch, otherwise don't bother, your Zen 4 chip is still great, especially if gaming is all you do. Raptor Lake 8P+12E chips such as the 14700K are still leading benchmarks, and Bartlett Lake's purported 10P+0E Core 7 configuration would smoke this chip. The Arrow Lake Core Ultra 7 should be significantly faster even at 6P+8E, due to Lion Cove and Skymont gains.
Overall, I am satisfied with what was delivered. Hope folks manage to buy them soon. More people with great machines the merrier.
