At this year’s Computex event, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su has officially revealed the company’s latest product range, the AMD Ryzen 9000 series of processors. Codenamed ‘Granite Ridge’, these new Ryzen 9000 series feature their brand new Zen 5 architecture, touting huge gains in performance as well as other improvements over the previous Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 series of processors.
According to AMD, Zen 5 will be based on a new, still undisclosed process node from TSMC. Zen 5 is positioned by AMD as a ‘next-gen, high performance CPU core’, with overall gains of 16% in instructions per cycle throughput compared to Zen 4 and significantly better power efficiency, all while retaining similar core counts to its predecessor. Ryzen 9000 will continue to use the AM5 platform too, with AMD now stating that it will support the AM5 platform until at least 2027. The AMD X870 and X870E motherboard platforms also debut alongside Ryzen 9000, and these new boards will offer higher memory overclocks, USB 4.0 as well as PCIe Gen 5 graphics and NVMe support.
At the very top of the Ryzen 9000 family is the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X. It features 16 cores and 32 threads that boost up to 5.7GHz, with 80MB of L2+L3 cache and a 170W TDP. AMD claims that their new flagship desktop processor will be able to offer up to 56% in performance gains compared to the Intel Core i9-14900K in productivity workloads, as well as gains of up to 23% against the Intel chip in gaming performance.
Of course, the Ryzen 9 9950X isn’t the only one in the Ryzen 9000 series. Moving down the product stack, there’s also the Ryzen 9 9900X with 12-cores, 24-threads, speeds of up to 5.6GHz, 76MB of cache and a 120W TDP. You’ll find the Ryzen 7 9700X below it with 8-cores, 16-threads running at up to 5.5GHz, with 40MB of cache and a 65W TDP. Lastly, the Ryzen 5 9600X packs 6-cores, 12-threads, boosts up to 5.4GHz, 38MB of cache and a 65W TDP.
That being said, there are still a couple of bits of information missing from today’s keynote regarding Ryzen 900. For starters, we don’t have any information about its base speeds, nor do we know what kind of integrated graphics—if any—they have, though it’s likely it will have the same kind of basic iGPU in the Ryzen 7000 series. Also missing is the specific memory speed support information, though we do know that it’ll support DDR5 memory only.
For those of you keen on an AMD Ryzen 9000 series processor as a major upgrade for your gaming PC or looking to build a new one altogether, they are going to be available from July 2024 onwards. However, no details about pricing have been made available at time of writing.
