AMD Ryzen 9000 review: Impressive efficiency, with bugs and moderate speed boosts

Nearly two years after the launch of the first Ryzen 7000 processors, AMD is back with a new, full-featured lineup. The new Ryzen 9000 chips—the six-core 9600X, eight-core 9700X, twelve-core 9900X, and sixteen-core 9950X—deliver AMD’s new Zen 5 architecture for desktops just two weeks after it was launched in Ryzen AI chips for laptops.

We came away from the massively named Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 impressed with both its performance and power efficiency, and AMD is also counting on power efficiency as a key selling point for the Ryzen 9000 series. Three of the chips have seen significant power reductions compared to last-gen chips while still boasting low-double-digit performance increases. This is rare at a time when Intel is pushing its chips to the limit to squeeze every ounce of performance out of its high-end Core i9 and Core i7 chips.

The focus on power efficiency will give many users – especially those who don’t use the default settings – chips that are less power-hungry and run a little cooler. And for those willing to tinker with some of that efficiency in exchange for a performance boost, many of these chips (particularly the 9700X and 9900X) have plenty of extra performance headroom. It’s also nice that all AM5 motherboards on the market are 9000-series compatible once you install a BIOS update, and mandatory BIOS Flashback support for the AM5 platform means you don’t have to resort to weird and impractical hacks. Like a CPU lending program “boot kit” To update the BIOS when you purchase a motherboard with an older BIOS version installed.

But not everything is smooth sailing. Motherboard and RAM costs remain an issue across the AM5 platform nearly two years after launch, especially for budget buyers. Launch prices are high, especially compared to current market prices for 7000 and 7000X3D series CPUs. And we ran into a few bugs during testing that may also affect other early adopters as we wait for AMD and motherboard manufacturers to patch things up.

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Compared to the Ryzen 7000 launch, when AMD was rolling out new CPUs, new architectures, new I/O dies (IODs), new chipsets, a new integrated graphics unit, (mandatory) DDR5 support, and a brand-new processor socket all at once, the Ryzen 9000 launch is pretty quiet. The IOD is the same. The RDNA2-based integrated graphics unit is the same (and, it bears repeating, not at all for gaming). The AM5 socket is the same. Officially supported DDR5 speeds have increased slightly, from DDR5-5200 to DDR5-5600. But the widespread availability and support for factory-overclocked RAM in desktop motherboards means that a modest increase in officially supported RAM speeds doesn’t mean much; AMD still recommends DDR5-6000 for optimal performance.

There are new 800-series chips, but they’re so incrementally improved over the old 600-series chips that AMD didn’t even ship a new motherboard with the new processors. We were instructed to install a new BIOS update on existing X670E boards from the Ryzen 7000 launch instead (this almost never happens, even when advanced compatibility is a selling point). This feels like a subtle nod from AMD — don’t feel like you need to wait or pay extra for a newer motherboard, which would only add to the high base price of the AM5 platform.

That leaves us with only two new things worth noting: the Zen 5 architecture itself and the new core-coupled device (CCD) that groups up to eight Zen 5 cores together.

The Ryzen 9000’s Zen 5 CCD is built using TSMC’s N4P process, an upgrade from the 5nm process used in the Ryzen 7000 series. TSMC He says N4P technology is 22% more power efficient than the 5nm process, which is part of what enables AMD to use a lower TDP for most Ryzen 9000X CPUs while still delivering faster performance.

It also probably has something to do with the Ryzen 9000’s lower operating temperatures, which AMD says should be about 7 degrees Celsius lower than equivalent Ryzen 7000 CPUs at the same power levels. The Ryzen 7000X chips running at their default TDPs were a bit hot, and while AMD says this is normal and safe behavior, a cooler chip will typically provide better consistency and longevity.

One of the major architectural changes from Zen 4 concerns support for AVX512 extensions, which Intel introduced (It is known in some circles) in 2017 with some higher-end Skylake variants but not enabled on modern consumer CPUs because Intel’s E cores don’t support it. Zen 4 brought AVX512 instructions to Ryzen CPUs for the first time, but did so by combining two 256-bit data paths. Zen 5 has a full 512-bit data path for AVX512 instructions, and for the (still rare) tasks that actually use AVX512, it gives Zen 5 a disproportionately high performance boost.