Month: June 2024

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  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.

Enlarge / AMD's Ryzen 9 AI 300 series is a new chip and a new naming scheme. (credit: AMD)

Less than two years ago, AMD announced that it was overhauling its numbering scheme for laptop processors. Each digit in its four-digit CPU model numbers picked up a new meaning which, with the help of a detailed reference sheet, promised to inform buyers of exactly what it was they were buying.

One potential issue with this, as we pointed out at the time, was that this allowed AMD to change over the first and most important of those four digits every single year that it decided to re-release a processor, regardless of whether that chip actually included substantive improvements or not. Thus a “Ryzen 7730U” from 2023 would look two generations newer than a Ryzen 5800U from 2021, despite being essentially identical.

AMD is partially correcting this today by abandoning the self-described “decoder ring” naming system and resetting to something more conventional.

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  AMD's Ryzen AI 300 series is its next-gen laptop platform, and the first to support Copilot+ PC features. [credit: AMD ]

AMD’s next-generation laptop processors are coming later this year, joining new Ryzen 9000 desktop processors and ushering in yet another revamp to the way AMD does laptop CPU model numbers.

But the big thing the company wants to push is the new chips’ performance in generative AI and machine learning workloads—it’s putting “Ryzen AI” right in the name, and emphasizing the presence of an improved neural processing unit (NPU) that meets and exceeds Microsoft’s performance requirements for Copilot+ PCs. The new Ryzen AI 300-series succeed the Ryzen 8040 chips from earlier this year, which were themselves a relatively mild refresh for the Ryzen 7040 processors less than a year before.

AMD promises performance of up to 50 trillion operations per second (TOPS) with its new third-generation NPU, a significant boost from the 10 to 16 TOPS offered by Ryzen 7000 and 8000 processors with NPUs. This would make it faster than the 45 TOPS offered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus in the first wave of Copilot+ compatible PCs, and also Intel’s projected performance for its next-generation Core Ultra chips, codenamed Lunar Lake. All exceed Microsoft’s Copilot+ requirement of 40 TOPS, which enables some Windows 11 features that aren’t normally available on typical PCs. Copilot+ PCs can do more AI processing locally on device rather than relying on the cloud, potentially improving performance and giving users more privacy.