AMD Launches Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 CPUs, Arrives Sept. 27 Starting at $299

AMD unveiled its 5nm Ryzen 7000 lineup today, outlining the details of four new models that span from the 16-core $699 Ryzen 9 7950X flagship to the six-core $299 Ryzen 5 7600X, the lowest bar of entry to the first family of Zen 4 processors.

Ryzen 7000 marks the first 5nm x86 chips for desktop PCs, but AMD’s newest chips don’t come with higher core counts than the previous-gen models. However, frequencies stretch up to 5.7 GHz – an impressive 800 MHz improvement over the prior generation – paired with an up to 13% improvement in IPC from the new Zen 4 microarchitecture. That results in a 29% improvement in single-threaded performance over the prior-gen chips. That higher performance also extends out to threaded workloads, with AMD claiming up to 45% more performance in some threaded workloads.

AMD says these new chips power huge generational gains over the prior-gen Ryzen 5000 models, with 29% faster gaming and 44% more performance in productivity apps. Going head-to-head with Intel’s chips, AMD claims the high-end 7950X is 11% faster overall in gaming than Intel’s fastest chip, the 12900K, and that even the low-end Ryzen 5 7600X beats the 12900K by 5% in gaming. It’s noteworthy that those claims come with a few caveats, which we’ll cover further below.

The Ryzen 7000 processors come to market on September 27, and they’ll be joined by new DDR5 memory products that support new EXPO overclocking profiles. AMD’s partners will also offer a robust lineup of motherboards – the chips will snap into new Socket AM5 motherboards that AMD says it will support until 2025+. These motherboards support DDR5 memory and the PCIe 5.0 interface, bringing the Ryzen family up to the latest connectivity standards.

The X670 Extreme and standard X670 chipsets arrive first in September, while the more value-oriented B650 options will come to market in October. That includes the newly announced B650E chipset that brings full PCIe 5.0 connectivity to budget motherboards, while the B650 chipset slots in as a lower-tier option.

The Ryzen 7000 lineup also brings integrated RDNA 2 graphics to all of the processors in the stack, a first for the Ryzen family. 

AMD Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 Specifications and Pricing

In the table above, we can see the 5nm Ryzen 7000 processors with the new Zen 4 architecture compared to the prior-gen 7nm Ryzen 5000 processors with the Zen 3 architecture. We’ve listed both the current retail pricing for AMD’s Ryzen 5000 chips along with the original launch pricing in parenthesis.

The 16-core 32-thread Ryzen 9 7950X is $100 less than the original launch pricing of the Ryzen 9 5950X, a win for those on the hunt for the highest-end performance possible. The 12-core 24-thread Ryzen 9 7900X maintains the same price as its predecessor, the 5900X.

However, AMD raised the launch pricing of the eight-core 16-thread Ryzen 7 7700X by $100 over the 5700X. AMD also kept the entry-level pricing at the same $299 with the Ryzen 5 7600X, but that isn’t a complete win – this same high bar for entry-level pricing wasn’t well-received with the Ryzen 5000 family. AMD says that the chips offer better performance per dollar than both Intel’s competing Alder Lake and the prior-gen Ryzen 5000 chips, which justifies the price tag. 

Other cost considerations weigh in, though. AMD’s Ryzen 7000 platform requires DDR5 memory that continues to command a premium over DDR4, and that will add to the overall system cost. In contrast, Intel’s looming Raptor Lake processors have the option for either DDR4 or DDR5 memory, providing a more value-centric option. That said, Intel has also recently announced that it will increase its chip pricing due to supply chain disruptions and other factors, so we won’t know the full pricing story until Intel launches Raptor Lake. 

Here we can see how Ryzen 7000 stacks up against Intel’s existing chips, along with information that we’ve collected about Intel’s yet-to-be-announced Raptor Lake. Be aware that the Raptor Lake specifications in the above table are not official.

Intel’s Alder Lake Core i9-12900K is faster in most workloads than the current Ryzen flagship, but its next-gen 13900K adds in eight more E-Cores, which will deliver substantially more performance in heavily-threaded workloads. Intel has also sprinkled in four more e-cores for its 13700K and 13600K. 

Intel has also brought E-cores to its value-centric 13400 SKU for the first time, which will make for a significantly more competitive chip on the lower end of the market where AMD doesn’t have as much presence. Again, pricing is the wild card, and Intel has yet to make any official announcements.

AMD Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 Benchmarks

As with all vendor-provided benchmarks, you should take the above test results with a grain of salt. AMD hasn’t yet revealed the officially supported memory speeds for the Ryzen 7000 series, but the test notes do point to the company using DDR4-6000C30 Expo memory profiles. These new EXPO profiles are very similar to the existing XMP and allow one-click memory overclocking to predefined speeds. AMD also used these same memory profiles for Intel’s processors, but it is unclear if those profiles are tuned for Intel chips.

AMD’s comparisons to its previous-gen chips are impressive, but the benchmarks against Intel’s Core i9-12900K show substantial advantages in both threaded rendering applications (57% faster in vRay with 47% better power efficiency) and in single-threaded work, though we do have to caution that those Geekbench 5 results are only indicative of one single threaded workload.

Perhaps most surprisingly, AMD claims that its lowest end chip, the Ryzen 5 7600X, is 5% faster in gaming than Intel’s flagship 12900K. Of course, the question is how this will compare to the coming Raptor Lake processors, and if the EXPO memory profiles had an impact on the test systems. We’ve also included the test notes at the end of the article for your perusal.

AMD Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 IPC and Microarchitecture

AMD shared some of the initial details of the Zen 4 architecture, saying it is an iterative advance over Zen 3. In contrast, Zen 5, which arrives in 2024, will be a grounds-up redesign.

Here we can see AMD’s progression in clock rates over the Ryzen era. As you can see, the 800 MHz increase in clock speeds with the 7000 series processors marks the largest single gain in Ryzen’s history.

AMD Socket AM5 Motherboards, Chipsets and DDR5 EXPO Profiles

AMD announced that its X670 and X670E chipsets will be available at launch, while the newly-announced B650E and the B650 will arrive in October. AMD also expects memory makers to be ready with EXPO-enabled kits at launch. AMD hasn’t announced the official base memory speed for Ryzen 7000, but the slide with DDR5-5200 listed in 2022 heavily implies that is the stock speed.

We’re updating this story with new information, stay tuned.