AMD’s first Zen 5 CPUs are finally here. Here’s everything you need to know about Ryzen 9000 and Ryzen AI 300 processors.
AMD Zen 5 is the next-generation Ryzen CPU architecture for Team Red, and its gunning for a spot among the best processors. After a major showing in June, the first Ryzen 9000 and Ryzen AI 300 CPUs are already here. AMD promises significant performance advantages for the new architecture that will give it a big leap in gaming and productivity tasks, and the company also claims it will have major leads over Intel’s top 14th-generation alternatives, allowing it to compete among the best gaming processors.
Now that we’ve had the chips in hand for a while, here’s everything you need to know about Zen 5, Ryzen 9000, and Ryzen AI 300.Zen 5 release date, availability, and price
AMD originally confirmed that the Ryzen 9000 desktop processors will launch on July 31, 2024, two weeks after the launch date of the Ryzen AI 300. The initial lineup includes the Ryzen 9 9950X, the Ryzen 9 9900X, the Ryzen 7 9700X, and the Ryzen 5 9600X. However, AMD delayed the CPUs at the last minute, with the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 showing up on August 8, and the Ryzen 9s showing up on August 15.
This was a surprise early release and seems likely to be an effort to get ahead of Intel, which is slated to debut its Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake CPUs much later in the year. It also gives AMD a chance to get its CPUs into the new breed of “AI” laptops that many major manufacturers are pushing.
Additional non-X and X3D variants are expected in the months that follow, with Club386 teasing that we might see the X3D chips as soon as September. That’d be sooner than expected, given that in the previous generation, the gap between the initial release and the X3D variants was longer.
For pricing, AMD reduced the list price across the Zen 5 desktop lineup compared to the previous generation. All of the new chips are cheaper, though to varying degrees. The two Ryzen 9s are $50 cheaper, for example, while the Ryzen 5 is only $20 cheaper. You can see how the pricing breaks down below.
As usual, the actual price you’ll pay comes down to individual retailers. Given the rapidly declining prices of last-gen Zen 4 CPUs, AMD’s new Zen 5 lineup should fall below list price in short order.Zen 5 specs and architecture
AMD detailed the specifications of the four new Ryzen 9000 processors at Computex 2024, showcasing comparable core counts and clock speeds to the previous generation, while claiming inter-process communication (IPC) uplifts from the new architectural design.
These specs are very comparable to their Ryzen 7000 equivalents, with the same cache quantities, thread counts, and clock speeds. What is different this time around is power draw. While the top-tier 9950X still has the same 170-watt thermal design power (TDP) of its 7950X predecessor, the other CPUs require far less.
The 7900X was a 170W TDP component, but the new 9900X pulls a mere 120W, and both the 9700X and 9600X are just 65W chips. While the power draw figures may be a little higher in real-world use, this is a notable improvement over their last-generation counterparts, and shows a big uplift in efficiency for the new Zen 5 design.
Despite previous rumors that AMD may want to tweak the TDP on the Ryzen 7 9700X in order to make it more competitive, AMD is sticking to the TDP that it initially announced — and it appears to be quite proud of its efficiency gains. During the Zen 5 Tech Day, AMD shared some initial slides regarding gen-on-gen improvements between Zen 4 and Zen 5.
Three out of the four new AMD processors saw a significant decrease in their power consumption.
