I feel the need for speed! AMD today launched its highly anticipated Ryzen 7000 series of desktop processors based on its Zen 4 architecture. And these new CPUs are faster than we thought.
This new lineup has four SKUs in total for now, and they will be available on September 27.
At a special event, the company unveiled its new series of processors, claiming higher-than-expected performance—at least, higher figures than what we were told at Computer in June. These new chips boast a higher IPC and a beefier single-threaded bump.
Here is the big launch:
The 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen 9 7950X leads the charge, followed by the 12-core, 24-thread Ryzen 9 7900X, the 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 7700X, and finally the 6-core, 12-thread Ryzen 5 7600X.
They are priced at $699, $549, $399, and 299, respectively.
AMD says that the flagship 7950X is up to 57% faster than its predecessor, the 5950X in Chaos V-Ray. Meanwhile, compared to the Intel i9 12900K, the new chip is impressively 62% faster. The fact that it does this while consuming 47% less power thanks to the 5 nm process is the icing on the cake.
Contrary to earlier pricing rumors, the Ryzen 9 7950X hits store shelves at a full $100 below the original price of its immediate predecessor, the Zen-powered Ryzen 9 5950X.
The chip giant hypes these new chips as gaming powerhouses, thanks to a 13% IPC lift and high boost clocks that go all the way up to 5.7GHz. So much so that it touts even the Ryzen 5 7600X as offering better gaming performance than the Core i9 12900K.
That’s not to say, the new Ryzen 7000 series CPUs are slouch in high-performance computing workloads.
Thanks to support for the AVX512 instruction set, among other architectural enhancements, these new processors are extremely powerful in HPC workloads.
All in all, this new line of processors is a breath of fresh air for the hardware market that has been waiting for the new generation to launch. Intel is not too far off with its upcoming 13th-generation lineup, which will take to the skies as Raptor Lake.
