Closing Thoughts

You'll have to wait for our conclusion when we review the Ryzen 9000 series processors a little later this month, and when we get a chance to take some Ryzen AI notebooks for a spin; but for now you can have our closing thoughts on what we've seen. Back when AMD Zen made landfall in 2017, nobody expected the company to remain competitive with Intel for more than a couple of generations, but the company has consistently proven everybody wrong. It has stuck to its roadmap, only promised what it could deliver, and delivered on those promises. We've been given consistent double-digit IPC gains for each new Zen generation, and every two generations, AMD has transitioned to a new class of process nodes. In a way, AMD and TSMC have been able to imitate Intel's tick-tock product development cycle far better than Intel itself.

AMD Zen 5 builds on the strengths of past Zen generations, and the company is promising a 16% IPC gain over Zen 4, which when coupled with the more refined 4 nm node, is enabling AMD to cut down TDP of some of its processor models without compromising on competitiveness. Is this enough for gamers? Sure, if you're upgrading from an older processor generation such as the Ryzen 5000 Zen 3, but not if you're on something like the Ryzen 7000X3D series. 3D V-cache technology works miracles for gaming performance, and given that the 7800X3D is expected to hold on to its leadership position a little longer, if you're a gamer, you should really wait for the inevitable Ryzen 9000X3D series, we just don't know when AMD plans to launch them.

If you're mostly into productivity with a little gaming on the side, Zen 5 has plenty of performance for you. The company has vastly improved the core's math compute capabilities that should improve content creation, media transcoding, and compute-heavy workload performance. In particular, 512-bit SIMD workloads should benefit from the new fat FPU which isn't just a dual-pumped 256-bit unit like on Zen 4.

AMD Ryzen 9000 series CPU core counts range between 6-core and 16-core, something that hasn't changed for AMD since the Ryzen 3000 Zen 2. AMD needs to work on this, because Intel Arrow Lake is about to hit AMD with not just those high-IPC Lion Cove cores, but also the Skymont E-cores where Intel has managed to pull off a miracle, with a 50% IPC increase over the previous E-core. Whatever core-count Intel may come up with for Arrow Lake may prove competitive against Granite Ridge. Sooner or later, AMD needs to reconsider core counts.

This also matters for the entry-level segment where Intel is selling quad-cores and dual-cores for less than $100. AMD's Ryzen offerings start a $140 currently, and it seems unlikely that Ryzen 9000 will change that. No doubt, you can get better price/performance from AMD, but there's a lot of people who don't need a lot of compute performance and would rather save money that they can spend elsewhere.

The Ryzen AI 300 series Strix Point is a power-packed monolithic mobile processor that combines the very latest from AMD. Given that Lunar Lake has its delivery timelines pushed to late-Q3 or Q4 2024, and given that AMD is able to push these chips now, the company might enjoy a moment under the sun with this chip, driving the very first wave of notebooks that meet Copilot+ AI PC requirements. AMD has balanced its 50 TOPS-class NPU with a formidable 12-core CPU based on Zen 5 and Zen 5c cores; and a powerful iGPU with 1,024 stream processors based on the RDNA 3.5 architecture. At this time it looks like Copilot+ will be a Qualcomm exclusive for many more months, and the x86 version of it won't come before Q4 2024.

The real bread winner for AMD with Zen 5 is bound to be the 5th Gen EPYC Turin, which sees CPU core counts go up to a staggering 192. As long as AMD is able to push out raw core-counts with reasonably high IPC, it will remain competitive against Intel's Xeon 6 processor generation with all its on-die accelerators.

We're really happy with what we're seeing with the Ryzen AI 300 series mobile processors. The Ryzen 9000 desktop processors are exciting, too, but we really wish it came with an NPU and beat the 7800X3D, because Arrow Lake-S will probably do both, at unknown power levels though.