During their “together we advance PCs” webcast on Monday, AMD provided further details regarding the new RDNA 3 graphics cards and Ryzen 7000 series CPUs, including pricing, performance, certain release dates, and other information.
On September 27, 2022, four CPUs using the new Zen 4 desktop computing architecture (codenamed “Raphael”) will be on sale. The top-tier Ryzen 9 7950X CPU, which has 16 cores, 32 threads, and a boost frequency of up to 5.7GHz, will retail for $699 at launch.
The three more processors are the Ryzen 7 7700X (8 cores, 16 threads, and a 5.3GHz boost), priced at $399, the Ryzen 5 7600X (6 cores, 12 threads, and a 5.3 GHz boost), priced at $299. The Ryzen 9 7900X (12 cores, 24 threads, and a 5.6GHz boost) is the most powerful of the three. In contrast to AMD’s earlier claims of an 8–10% IPC improvement over the Zen 3 (Ryzen 5000 series) generation, the company now asserts during the presentation that the Zen4 CPUs have a 13% IPC improvement.
Other promises include a 29 percent improvement in single-thread performance, but until these promises are made public and open to external benchmarking, take them with a grain of salt. Some of the projected gains are hazy, like the alleged 6 to 35 percent improvement in gaming performance between the new Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 9 5950X.
When AMD compared the performance of its most recent flagships to that of the Intel i9-12900K in the V-Ray benchmark, the Zen 4 processor showed up to a 47 percent better performance per watt and a potential improvement of 57 percent in raytracing. This is how AMD sees longtime rival and market leader Intel fitting into this. Just keep in mind that this is just one benchmark among many, and AMD has a vested interest in making this launch appealing to customers eager to update their desktop PCs. When objective benchmark testing can be conducted, we will have a more realistic picture of performance comparison.
The AMD website indicates that all four Ryzen 7000 SKUs will come with integrated Radeon RDNA 2 graphics, despite being omitted from the presentation. Two graphics cores, each with 64 stream processors and a boost frequency of up to 2.2GHz, will be included in each Raphael CPU. It’s doubtful that you’ll want to forego a full desktop graphics card in favor of this built-in option, so don’t get too excited about its gaming potential just yet. The integrated GPU will only be enough for jobs like basic content production and display outputs.
If you want to upgrade or construct a new PC anytime soon, there are a few key points from the presentation to keep in mind. First off, the AM5 socket platform will be used by this generation of AMD CPUs, necessitating a motherboard change. Pricing for AM5 motherboards will start at $125, and they will be supported at least until 2025, which fits in well with the anticipated release of Zen 5 in 2024.
However, it does not imply that AM4 is complete. During the presentation, Lisa Su said, “We do expect AM4 and AM5 to coexist for quite some time.” You should anticipate that, similar to AM4, the complete AM5 stack will be built out, although it will take some time as we want to ensure the cost points are accurate as usual. However, it does imply that you should prepare to update your system memory since AM5 will no longer accept DDR4 memory and will instead embrace DDR5 RAM.
We also got a sneak peek at the next Radeon graphics card generation, so announcements about processors weren’t the only thing made. The flagship model of the AMD Radeon RX 7000 series is said to have the Navi 31 GPU with 12288 stream processors and up to 24 GB of GDDR6 memory, while this information is currently speculative. The AMD Radeon RX 7000 series will be built on a 5nm production node. Regarding its future graphics cards, AMD was less open with details than it was with regard to its new CPUs.
During the presentation, Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, confirmed that at least one Radeon 7000 is operational and conducting tests, and she reaffirmed previous claims that the new GPU architecture will provide a 50% performance per watt increase over RDNA 2. She also stated that the performance of the Radeon 7000 “absolutely wonderful.”
With an all-black color scheme and a touch of RGB lighting reminiscent of the Radeon RX 6950XT, the design resembles that of the flagship cards from the previous generation. The triple fan design and card thickness indicate this will be a high-end model, however neither the name of the next-gen model nor the power connection were mentioned during the presentation.
Advanced chiplet packaging, newly designed compute units, an improved graphics pipeline, and a next-generation AMD Infinity Cache are further things to look forward to. By the end of the year, the next generation of AMD Radeon graphics cards should also be available, but no precise release date has been specified.