We were invited by AMD to Los Angeles last week, to be part of several technical presentations by the company's engineering leads in order to better understand its new Zen 5 CPU microarchitecture. Zen 5 marks the fifth generation of AMD's winning Zen series CPU microarchitectures that have turned a once written-off company in the processor market back to competitiveness. It seems like just a couple of years have gone by, but AMD Zen is now into its seventh year, and the company has transitioned two desktop sockets, five chipset series, and seven processor lines. The new Zen 5 microarchitecture powers the new AMD Ryzen 9000 series "Granite Ridge" processors on the desktop, the all important Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" processors on notebooks, and the 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" server processors. AMD is planning to launch the new server processors a little later this year, but has dedicated Summer 2024 to its client segment—desktops and notebooks.
The new Zen 5 microarchitecture builds on AMD's proven CPU core technology, and doesn't try anything fancy like its generational counterpart from Intel, the Lion Cove P-core used on Arrow Lake. Zen 5 still brings a double-digit percentage IPC gain over the previous generation, and introduces several efficiency improvements over Zen 4 thanks not just to its newer 4 nm process, but also a host of other innovations. AMD was able to increase clock speeds, and lower TDP across the desktop processor lineup, while still achieving good performance gains.
The notebook processor series is particularly important for AMD, as the notebook segment undergoes an upheaval in the form of native AI acceleration, the introduction of Microsoft Copilot+ standard, and the need for a processor to feature a 40 TOPS-class NPU to meet it. The new Ryzen AI 300 series mobile processor based on the Strix Point monolithic silicon does just this, combining not just up to 12 CPU cores based on Zen 5 or its derivative Zen 5c, but also a powerful iGPU based on the newer RDNA 3.5 graphics architecture that massively improves performance per Watt over RDNA 3; and a 50 TOPS NPU powered by the XDNA 2 architecture that introduces support for new efficient data formats, which exceeds the performance requirements of Copilot+ while retaining the power footprint of an NPU.
Over on the desktop side, the AMD Ryzen 9000 Granite Ridge processors continue using the Socket AM5 infrastructure of Ryzen 7000 Raphael, and are backwards compatible with all AMD 600-series chipset motherboards (with a BIOS update). The company is also taking the opportunity to introduce the new AMD 800-series chipsets, which shuffle up I/O features among the specific chipset SKUs, to provide better choice. AMD has retained its CPU core counts from the past several generations—you get these processors in 6-core, 8-core, 12-core, and 16-core variants. These aren't hybrid or heterogeneous multicore processors, there are no E-Cores, every core is a P-Core.
AMD is planning to launch both the Ryzen 9000 desktop and Ryzen AI 300 notebook processors this Summer. Some of the first notebooks powered by the Ryzen AI 300 series should be announced by notebook OEMs as early as this week; while the Ryzen 9000 series desktop processors will be available to customers from July 31, 2024. The company hasn't finalized prices of its desktop processors. In this article, we will provide a technical deep-dive of these processors, and the underlying Zen 5, RDNA 3.5, and XDNA 2 technologies, as well as their platforms, feature sets, and first-party performance claims from AMD. We will, of course, have our reviews of the Ryzen 9000 series up before launch day.
The Zen 5 Desktop Lineup
The AMD Ryzen 9000 series Granite Ridge desktop lineup looks very similar to previous Ryzen 7000 Raphael and Ryzen 5000 Vermeer offerings; with one SKU each from the target CPU core counts AMD intends for the market—6-core, 8-core, 12-core, and 16-core. AMD hasn't changed the processor model numbering scheme for its desktop processors. The series is led by the 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X, followed by the 12-core Ryzen 9 9900X, the 8-core Ryzen 7 9700X, and the 6-core Ryzen 5 9600X. The four directly succeed the 7950X, 7900X, 7700X, and 7600X from the previous generation.
What's interesting is that AMD has revamped the TDP limits of these processors, when compared to Ryzen 7000. While the x950X is still 170 W, the TDPs of the smaller processors are considerably lower, especially the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 with just 65 W is impressive and should be fantastic for power and cooling requirements.
As expected, all Ryzen 9000 processors come without a cooling solution. Given the 170 W TDP of the 9950X, an AIO is probably a good idea. The Ryzen 9 9900X should run fine with a decent air cooler, too, which is a pretty big improvement over the 7900X.
All four processor models will launch on July 31, AMD hasn't finalized their pricing.
Ryzen 9 9950X
Ryzen 9 9950X
Ryzen 9 7950X
Core i9-14900K
Architecture
Zen 5 / Granite Ridge
Zen 4 / Raphael
Raptor Lake
Process
4 nm / 6 nm
5 nm / 6 nm
10 nm
Socket
AM5
AM5
LGA 1700
Cores / Threads
16 / 32
16 / 32
8+16 / 32
Max Boost
5.7 GHz
5.7 GHz
6.0 / 4.4 GHz
Base Clock
4.3 GHz
4.5 GHz
3.2 / 2.4 GHz
L3 Cache
64 MB
64 MB
36 MB
TDP
170 W
170 W
125 W
Price
TBD
$540
$550
The Ryzen 9 9950X is a maxed out 16-core/32-thread model that uses two 4 nm CCDs, with all 8 cores on the two enabled. The processor boosts up to 5.7 GHz, and features a total cache of 80 MB. That's 1 MB of L2 cache per core, and 32 MB of L3 cache per CCD. The processor's TDP is unchanged from the 7950X, at 170 W.
Given that AMD beat Intel to the new processor generation, with Intel's Core Ultra Arrow Lake-S desktop processors not coming out before October at least; AMD has to compare these chips to what Intel current has. The 9950X and 9900X will be compared to the Core i9-14900K, the 9700X to the Core i7-14700K, the 9600X to the Core i5-14600K. AMD is severely lagging behind on Intel in raw CPU core counts, since there are no E-cores; but AMD's productivity and gaming benchmarks bank on the superior IPC of the Zen 5 cores, besides their clock speeds.