AMD’s next-gen Ryzen 9000 desktop chips and the Zen 5 architecture arrive in July
AMD is announcing Ryzen 9000 and Zen 5, the second CPU architecture for its AM5 platform. [credit: AMD ]
It's been almost two years since AMD introduced its Ryzen 7000 series desktop CPUs and the Zen 4 CPU architecture. Today, AMD is announcing the first concrete details about their successors. The Ryzen 9000 CPUs begin shipping in July.
At a high level, the Ryzen 9000 series and Zen 5 architecture offer mostly incremental improvements over Ryzen 7000 (Ryzen 8000 on the desktop is used exclusively for Zen 4-based G-series CPUs with more powerful integrated GPUs). AMD says that Zen 5 is roughly 16 percent faster than Zen 4 at the same clock speeds, depending on the workload-certainly not nothing, and there are some workloads that perform much better. But that number is far short of the 29 percent jump between Zen 3 and Zen 4.
AMD and Intel have both compensated for mild single-core performance improvements in the past by adding more cores, but Ryzen 9000 doesn't do that. From the 9600X to the 9950X, the chips offer between 6 and 16 full-size Zen 5 cores, the same as every desktop lineup since Zen 2 and the Ryzen 3000 series. De-lidded shots of the processors indicate that they're still using a total of two or three separate chiplets: one or two CPU chiplets with up to 8 cores each, and a separate I/O die to handle connectivity. The CPU chiplets are manufactured on a TSMC N4 process, an upgrade from the 5nm process used for Ryzen 7000, while the I/O die is still made with a 6nm TSMC process.