The Sunnyvale giant introduced the Ryzen 9000, a new generation high performance processors with which AMD strengthened its commitment to the mainstream consumer market. These new processors use the Zen 5 architecture and generally represent an interesting evolution compared to the Ryzen 7000.

At the time I told you that it was most likely that AMD would achieve a CPI improvement of between 10% and 15% with Ryzen 9000, but in the end the company was able to exceed my expectations as it ensures that this new generation offers 16% improvement in IPC compared to Ryzen 7000.

This jump in terms of CPI is undoubtedly what makes a substantial difference at a generational level. On a design level, AMD has kept the foundation we saw in Zen 4, which means we have a Chip design with up to two CCD units with 8 cores and 16 wires eachalong with 32MB of L3 cache per drive.

It is just below the CPU chiplets chiplet I/Owhich houses the input and output system, memory controllers and integrated graphics, which will allow us to use these processors without the need for a dedicated graphics card, which of course gives them more value.

A look at the new Ryzen 9000 architecture

Ryzen 9000 uses, as I said at the beginning of the article, the Zen 5 architecture and maintains a chiplet design with two blocks, CCD and I/O. The first has an 8-core configuration with SMT technology that allows each core to work with one process and one thread, has 32 MB of shared L3 cache and 8 MB L2 (1 MB per core).

A chiplet or CCD unit is manufactured in TSMC 4nm node under extreme ultraviolet lithography, while the I/O chip is manufactured on TSMC’s 6nm node. This chiplet integrates the entire input and output subsystem, as well as PCIe lanes, memory controllers and a Radeon RDNA 2 GPU with two compute units, equivalent to 128 shaders.

Zen 5 has an IPC improvement of up to 16% compared to Zen 4. This means that the Zen 5 core It is up to 16% faster than the Zen 4 core running at the same clock frequency. To achieve this important leap at the architectural level, AMD introduced some very interesting changes:

• Improved hop predictor accuracy and reduced latency.
• Wider pipes, more capacity for output and vector operations.
• Improved design to achieve greater parallelization.
• Up to twice the bandwidth when working with instructions on the frontend and also in movements from L2 to L1 and from L1 to the floating point unit.
• Higher performance in AI and with AVX512 instructions.

As you might imagine, changing the architecture and using a 4nm node in the CPU chiplet was also made possible by AMD improve consumption and performance values. This is evident in three of the four models, namely the 6 cores and 12 threads, the 8 cores and 16 threads, and the 12 cores and 24 threads, as their TDP has dropped considerably.

Ryzen 9000 models and specs

AMD has confirmed that it will list the total four different versions Ryzen 9000 and gave us the final specs of all of them. You can see them in the attached image, but I’ll break them down for you individually to make them clearer:

• Ryzen 9 9950X: 16 cores and 32 threads, turbo mode up to 5.7 GHz, 64 MB L3 cache, 16 MB L2 cache and 170 watt TDP.
• Ryzen 9 9900X: 12 cores and 24 threads, turbo mode up to 5.6 GHz, 64 MB L3 cache, 12 MB L2 cache and 120 watt TDP.
• Ryzen 7 9700X: 8 cores and 16 threads, turbo mode up to 5.5 GHz, 32 MB L3 cache, 8 MB L2 cache and 65 watt TDP.
• Ryzen 5 9600X: 6 cores and 12 threads, turbo mode up to 5.4 GHz, 32 MB L3 cache, 6 MB L2 cache and 65 watt TDP.

I still don’t have information on the possible selling price of the Ryzen 9000, but I imagine it will be similar or slightly higher to the one the Ryzen 7000 had at the time of its launch. The price of the Ryzen 7000s should drop after the launch of this new generation, and that’s interesting because it puts them in a very good position in terms of price to performance.

Ryzen 9000 performance

Depending on each specific test, the performance improvement over the Intel Core i9-14900K, which is the direct rival of the Ryzen 9 9950X, can vary quite a bit. In terms of productivity, the AMD solution achieves 7 to 55% higher performance, depending on the test used and the games it achieves 4% to 23% higher performancealso depending on the game used.

AMD also highlighted bandwidth and performance improvements in AI and reiterated this its commitment to the AM5 platform, which will continue to operate beyond 2027. This means that if we have an AM5 motherboard with a 700 series chipset, we have nothing to worry about as we can continue to update our CPU until 2027.

New X870 and X870E chipsets

As many of our readers will remember, it was rumored that AMD was going to launch new motherboards with new chipsets, which eventually came true, albeit partially. Within the high range, only one refresh will occurfor now.

AMD confirmed X870 and X870E chipsetswhich will be compatible with the USB 4 standard, will have PCIe Gen5 in both the PCI slot for the GPU and the slots for the M.2 NVMe SSD drives and will support AMD EXPO profiles at higher speeds, which means that we will be using RAM faster.

Release date and other things you should know

AMD has confirmed that the Ryzen 9000 will arrive in July of the same year. It will be a simultaneous launch, which means that all the models will be available at the same time, so we will be able to choose any of them after the launch.

All Ryzen 9000 it will work fine on AM5 boards with 700 series chipsetas long as we do a corresponding BIOS update, although we have to keep in mind that in the case of cheaper models with more modest power supply systems (VRMs), we may have problems with the Ryzen 9 9950X, which is something we should have actually already seen with the Ryzen 9 7950X, whose TDP is exactly the same.

When in doubt, it’s best to check if your motherboard will be able to handle the Ryzen 9 9950X before you buy. If gaming is your goal, the Ryzen 5 9600X will undoubtedly be your best choicebecause it has the optimal number of cores to run current games smoothly and its high IPC will be noticeable in this type of application.