AMD announces new Ryzen 9000 series desktop and Ryzen AI 300 mobile processors

AMD has announced its new series of processors for the desktop and mobile market at Computex 2024. These are based on the company's latest CPU architecture and bring improved performance, efficiency, features, and a heavy dose of AI capabilities.

Starting with the new desktop chips, AMD is skipping from its current Ryzen 7000 series directly to Ryzen 9000 for its mainline CPU range. These new chips are based on the company's latest Zen 5 architecture (codenamed Granite Ridge). Based on TSMC's latest 4nm FinFET process, the new CPU architecture promises on average 16% improvement in IPC (instructions per clock) over Zen 4.

AMD shared some basic details about this new architecture. It includes an updated branch predictor with improved accuracy and latency performance, higher throughout with wider pipelines and vectors, and deeper window instruction window sizes for more parallelism. The company claims up to 2x increase in instructions bandwidth thanks to increase in data bandwidth between L1 and L2 caches and increase in AI and AVX512 throughout by switching from 256-bit to 512-bit wide SIMD for AVX512.

What remains unchanged is the IO die and the overall die layout. The Ryzen 9000 chips will still use one or two CCD for CPU cores based on core count and an IO die for IO and memory operations. The IO die remains identical to Ryzen 7000 and still based on TSMC 6nm. The integrated Radeon GPU also remains identical with its 2 compute units.

Being announced today are four models. These are the usual suspects with 16, 12, 8, and 6-core count parts, namely, the Ryzen 9950X, 9900X, 9700X, and the 9600X, respectively. Compared to the previous generation models, the core count is identical. The boost clocks are also similar on the 16 and 12 core models but higher on the 8 and 6 core models. Notable, the base clocks have been dropped on all parts and consequently, the TDP has dropped on three of the four parts.

As mentioned before, AMD is claiming 16% IPC uplift over Zen 4. AMD also compared its new flagship 9950X with Intel's current flagship, the Core i9-14900K, and saw up to 21% improvement in Cinebench 2024 and up to 56% improvement in Blender. The improvement in gaming is smaller but the company claims up to 23% better performance in titles like Horizon Zero Dawn (which already performed better on AMD). Of course, these are cherry-picked first party results, so take them with a grain of salt.

AMD also announced new X870 and X870E chipsets for motherboards. Compared to X670 and X670E, we now have mandatory USB 4.0 on all X800 series boards as well as PCIe Gen 5 for graphics and SSD. AMD is also claiming higher EXPO memory overclocking speeds, with the base JEDEC spec being updated from 5200MHz on the Ryzen 7000 to 5600MHz on 9000. The 800 series motherboards will support Ryzen 7000 chips and the existing Ryzen 600 series motherboards would be able to support Ryzen 9000 with a BIOS update.

AMD also increased its support for AM5 from 2025+ to 2027+. This means, you are likely to get support for another generation of CPUs down the line, taking it from the previous two to now three.

Speaking of extending support, AMD is continuing to support its older AM4 platform with two new parts. Launched today are the Ryzen 7 5800XT and the Ryzen 9 5900XT. The 5800XT is an overclocked version of the 5800X with 100MHz higher boost clock and includes a Wraith Prism cooler in the box. Counterintuitively, the 5900XT is not an overclocked version of the 5900X but is rather a downclocked version of the 5950X, with the same 16-core/32-thread design but with 100MHz reduced boost and base clock speed.

Finally, AMD also announced two new chipsets for the notebook market as part of its new Ryzen AI 300 series. These include the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and the Ryzen AI 9 365. Compared to the previous generation Ryzen 8000 series that capped out at 8 cores, the new models go up to 12 cores, which include a combination of the new Zen 5 cores and slower Zen 5C cores. They also include new Radeon 890M graphics and an NPU with 50 TOPs of performance, making them compatible with Microsoft's Copilot+ features. Expect to see these parts in upcoming notebooks from Acer, ASUS, HP, Lenovo and MSI, who have announced support in their upcoming products.

Ryzen AI 300

The new Ryzen 9000 series and the 5000 series desktop parts will be available in July 2024. AMD has not announced any pricing as of this writing.

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