Most of the recent rumors have turned out to be true regarding AMD’s plans for its next generation Ryzen 9000 Zen 5 desktop processors and we found out nearly everything at AMD CEO, Lisa Su’s keynote at Taiwan’s Comptex trade show today. They will launch in July, have up to 16 cores in the case of the Ryzen 9 9950X and offer an average of 16 percent higher IPC or instructions per cycle compared to Ryzen 7000 CPUs.
As the two ranges of CPUs appear to have similar frequencies and cache amounts, it’s likely we could see that 16 percent performance uplift in software in games. However, that doesn’t mean that the new CPUs will be faster than older 3D V-Cache models. The extra cache there has its own boost to gaming performance and AMD didn’t mention any comparisons between Ryzen 7000 3D V-Cache models and Ryzen 9000.
The new Ryzen 9000 series
The actual specifications were very close to most of the leaks and rumors over the last few weeks, with a Ryzen 9 9950X flagship with 16 cores, Ryzen 9 9900X with 12 cores, Ryzen 7 9700X with eight cores and Ryzen 5 9600X with six cores. There are no changes to AMD’s Simultaneous Multitasking, so each core provides two threads.
The cache amounts, as you can see above are similar to Ryzen 7000 too, with these being the combined L2 an L3 cache amounts. So far, there’s no mention of pricing or an actual launch date, other than July. According to AMD, the improved performance comes from improved branch prediction, higher throughput with wider pipelines and vectors plus deeper window size across design for more parallelism. This results in up to twice the instruction bandwidth, data bandwidth and also AI performance.
New X870 and X870E chipsets
There are three key takeaways with AMD’s new chipsets, which will see dozens of new motherboards become available. The first two are features that will now be supported with all X870E/X870 chipset motherboards, which are USB 4 plus PCIe Gen 5 support on graphics and at least one M.2 NVMe SSD slot. There are quite a few X670 chipset motherboards out there that don’t support PCIe Gen 5 SSDs so this should make things clearer. In addition, higher memory speeds will be supported on these chipset motherboards too, courtesy of the memory’s EXPO profiles.
The big surprise: Ryzen 9 5900XT and Ryzen 7 5800XT for Socket AM4
They’re also been rumored but AMD also announced two new Ryzen 5000 CPUs that support it’s older Socket AM4. The Ryzen 9 5900XT is confusingly a 16-core CPU rather than 12-core CPU like the Ryzen 9 5900X, but unlike the Ryzen 9 5950X, which also has 16 cores and was launched back in 2020, it has a slightly lower boost frequency of 4.8GHz compared to 4.9GHz, but has more cache and cores than the Ryzen 9 5900X.
The Ryzen 7 5800XT, however, maintains the usual eight cores for a Ryzen 7 CPU, but gains an extra 100MHz of peak boost frequency. They’re interesting additions for those looking for an upgrade path if they have Ryzen 3000 or older processor and aren’t quite ready to take the leap to Socket AM5. These will also launch in July, but again we have no pricing.
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