AMD Zen 5 is the next-generation Ryzen CPU architecture for Team Red. And after a major showing at Computex 2024, it’s ready for a July launch. AMD promises major performance advantages for the new architecture that will give it a big leap in performance 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 processors.
We’ll need to wait for the release to know for sure how these chips perform, but here’s what we know about Zen 5 so far.
Zen 5 release date, availability, and price
AMD confirmed that the Ryzen 9000 desktop processors will launch on July 31, 2024, which marks 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.
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.
The pricing for the Ryzen 9000 lineup remains a complete mystery at this point. Although AMD showcased the new processors during the Zen 5 Tech Day, it still stayed silent on the pricing. However, rumor has it that AMD might cut the recommended list price (MSRP) compared to Zen 4 at launch.
The first preorders for Ryzen 9000 appeared at a Slovenian retailer. The flagship Ryzen 9950X was listed at 660 euros, which is roughly $708. That’s a lot more than the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, but it’s also cheaper than the European launch pricing for the Ryzen 9 7950X, which arrived with an 850 euro price tag. We’ll have to wait and see what AMD does this time around.
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.
| Cores/Threads | Base clock | Boost clock | L2 + L3 Cache | TDP | |
| Ryzen 9 9950X | 16/32 | 4.3GHz | 5.7GHz | 80MB | 170W |
| Ryzen 9 9900X | 12/24 | 4.4GHz | 5.6GHz | 76MB | 120W |
| Ryzen 7 9700X | 8/16 | 3.8GHz | 5.5GHz | 40MB | 65W |
| Ryzen 5 9600X | 6/12 | 3.9GHz | 5.4GHz | 36MB | 65W |
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.
Three out of the four new AMD processors saw a significant decrease in their power consumption. This could mean bad news for performance, but AMD claims otherwise. For instance, the Ryzen 5 9600X is said to be up to 17% faster while consuming far less power. On the other hand, the Ryzen 9 9950X may not feature a drop in TDP, but AMD claims that it’ll be up to 22% faster than its predecessor.
We’ve heard about IPC improvements for a while now, but until recently, it was unclear where those improvements are coming from. After all, the CPUs have the exact same core counts. However, AMD gave us a peek at the CPUs during the preview event, and we now know what’s new in Zen 5. The architectural changes that AMD outlined include:
- Zen 5 CPUs now support eight dispatch/retire units; up from six in Zen 4
- The number of arithmetic logic units (ALUs) in the core was increased from four to six
- Zen 5 now features a single 512-bit data path for AVX instructions instead of two 256-bit paths
Unlike Intel’s upcoming Arrow Lake CPUs, AMD has maintained simultaneous multithreading with Zen 5, and has made major improvements in branch prediction accuracy and latency to help improve overall multi-threading performance. As a result, AMD promises to deliver a 16% boost in IPC.
AMD has confirmed that its Zen 5 processors feature the RDNA 3.5 graphics architecture, which should mean even more capable onboard graphics than we saw with Ryzen 7000 CPUs. It’s not likely to be a huge upgrade, but considering we had perfectly passable performance for casual gaming on Zen 4, any upgrade is welcome. Ryzen 8000 APUs are already trying to hammer in the last nails of the entry-level graphics coffin. RDNA 3.5 on Zen 5 will only continue that trend.
AM5 socket
One of the greatest strengths of AMD’s Ryzen processors since their first generation has been in their upgradability. While Intel has typically offered fans two and occasionally three generations of support for any socket design, AMD’s Ryzen platform has been far more expansive. Anyone who bought a high-end motherboard from the Ryzen 1000 generation was able to simply plug in an AMD Ryzen 3000 or even 5000 CPU with a few BIOS updates and continue with the same memory, power, and everything else.
AMD is looking to replicate this with its AM5 socket, which debuted with Ryzen 7000 CPUs in the fall of 2022. Zen 5 uses the same AM5 socket as Zen 4, meaning not only will coolers be compatible, but CPUs will be too. Anyone with an existing X670E, X670, or B650 motherboard should be able to drop in a Zen 5 CPU and receive most of the benefits of the new generation as soon as they are available — though a BIOS update may be necessary.
AMD announced the first two new motherboard chipsets for Ryzen 9000 at Computex 2024, detailing the new x870 and x870E chipsets. Both bring USB4 support as standard, as well as PCI Express 5.0 for both graphics and storage slots. Higher memory frequencies are supported, too, potentially unlocking even greater performance for the next-gen CPUs.
Zen 5 performance
AMD has announced some first-party performance numbers for Zen 5, and they are impressive. These numbers are only from its top-tier Ryzen 9 9950X CPU, and are mostly compared to Intel’s best, but they are promising so far.
As mentioned above, AMD’s Zen 5 CPUs will reportedly enjoy an average instructions per clock increase of 16%, though that can be as much as 35% in certain applications. That ultimately leads to some big increases in productivity performance, with AMD citing numbers as high as a 56% lead against the 14900K in Blender.
That goes for gaming, too, where the 9950X reportedly beats the 14900K (which is roughly comparable to the 7800X3D and 7950X3D), by between 4% and 23%. Local-run AI like the Mistral large language model (LLM) are shown running faster on the new Ryzen CPUs, too.
AMD also shed some more light on CPU performance during the Zen 5 Tech Day event, including various performance charts. According to these results from the Cinebench R23 test, the Ryzen 9 9950X is about 15% faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X, and also 13% faster than the Core i9-14900K.
Another graph from AMD shows off the performance of the Ryzen 6 9600X when compared to the Core i5-14600K, and these results look solid — but we didn’t get any hard numbers. The Zen 5 midrange chip leads by a whopping 94% in Handbrake, and between 18% and 22% in the rest of the tests. Gaming tests ended up in gains between 5% in Hitman 3 and 29% in Horizon Zero Dawn.
The performance gains are present throughout the rest of the stack, although the improvements aren’t quite as pronounced. The Ryzen 9 9900X, when facing off against the Core i9-14900K, scored a 41% win in Handbrake. The rest of the productivity and content creation tests all resulted in a win for the Ryzen CPU, ranging from 2% to 16%. Similarly, the 9900X wins in gaming, with uplifts ranging from 4% to 22% in Horizon Zero Dawn.
Apart from AMD’s own benchmarks, which — while informative — don’t really give us any hard numbers to compare to, we have also seen some leaked Geekbench tests. In one of the tests, what appears to be a retail sample of the Ryzen 9 9900X scored the crown for the highest single-core score in the Geekbench 6.2 database with 3,401 points. It did well in multi-core, too, reaching 19,756 points. Given that this is a leaked benchmark and just a single test, it’s hard to estimate the actual performance of the CPU, though.
The Ryzen 9 9950X, on the other hand, was spotted in a Cinebench test. This was just an engineering sample, which means that it likely didn’t reach the full potential of the chip. Even then, the 9950X managed to score 42,336 points in Cinebench R23, which was enough to beat Intel’s top CPU, the Core i9-14900KS.
While we’ll need to wait to test these chips ourselves to know how good they really are, the early numbers look very good indeed.
3D V-Cache in Zen 5
AMD’s 3D V-Cache processors have been ruling the gaming charts ever since the release of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Seeing as the Ryzen 7 7800X3D was also a massive success, it’s only right that gamers are hoping for a follow-up in the form of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Good news: It’s coming. Bad news? We just don’t know when.
Unfortunately, AMD hasn’t revealed how it hopes to improve the 3D V-Cache chips, or when we might see them. It’s possible that AMD will update its chiplet approach to prevent situations where only one die comes with extra cache, which is the case right now. Similarly, we might see higher clock speeds, more overclocking capabilities, or — hopefully — even more cache.
3D V-Cache Performance Optimizer 1.0.0.9
1st pic: 6.02.07.2300
2nd pic: 6.05.28.016https://t.co/C0OmQJW7Dv pic.twitter.com/mjeafB7VYr— Posiposi (@harukaze5719) June 12, 2024
As a sign that AMD is working on the 3D chips even if they’re not set to launch in July, the company recently pushed a Ryzen chipset driver that added a new 3D V-Cache Optimizer.
Here comes AM5
AMD’s Zen 5 is shaping up to be a major launch for Team Red, and it’s gotten out ahead of the competition by a number of months. With Intel not slated to launch its Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake processors until much later this year, we may have several months of AMD absolutely dominating before Intel can swing back. It no doubt will, but can it do so hard enough?
AMD has shown with Zen 5 that it has the potential to be the performance and efficiency leader in productivity and gaming. That’s if it turns out to be true, but AMD’s first-party numbers have been historically relatively accurate compared to the real deal. Look out for our reviews of various Zen 5 components in the coming weeks to find our for sure.