AMD’s Ryzen 7000 Series Are the First 5nm Desktop CPUs Ever

AMD has been on a roll with its desktop and laptop CPUs in recent years, even as Intel catches up with its 11th and 12th-gen Core processors. Today the company revealed the Ryzen 7000 series of chips, marking another massive leap forward.

AMD revealed its new generation of Ryzen processors today at Computex 2022, called the Ryzen 7000 series. The processors will be the first to use AMD’s ‘Zen 4’ architecture, which the company says has an “extremely efficient 5nm” design — making it the first 5nm desktop processor ever (though the I/O components are 6nm). The smaller manufacturing die (in theory) means faster performance and improved power efficiency compared to older CPUs. Apple has been selling products with 5nm chips for a while now, including the A14 in the iPhone and the M1 in recent Mac computers, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 chipset for PCs is also 5nm.

Ryzen 7000 also includes double the amount of L2 cache per core, PCIe 5.0 support, higher clock speeds (the company showed off Ghostwire: Tokyo running at 5.5GHz), and DDR5 support. AMD says the new chips deliver a “15% uplift in single-thread performance versus the prior generation.”

Besides the usual mix of speed improvements and support for new hardware, there are a few significant changes to how AMD processors have worked in the past. Ryzen 7000 requires the new AM5 socket, which will mean anyone upgrading their PC will definitely have to buy a new motherboard alongside the CPU. AMD has supported the same AM4 socket since the first generation of Ryzen CPUs in 2017 — a significant achievement when Intel usually requires a new socket for every new CPU generation. However, coolers designed for AM4 will still work with AM5.

The Verge reports that every single Ryzen 7000 processor will have some level of integrated graphics, so you won’t necessarily have to plug in a graphics card (which are still hard to come by) just to get a video output. Intel and AMD both sell processors with and without integrated graphics, but it sounds like the feature will be guaranteed on Ryzen 7000.

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AMD didn’t reveal the specific processors in its new Ryzen 7000 lineup, but the company says they will be available starting in Q4 2022. Pricing is expected to range from $399 to $699.

The new lineup certainly looks impressive on paper, but we’ll have to wait for real-world performance tests to see if AMD pulled off another winner. The main competition from Intel at the moment is the first wave of ‘Alder Lake’ chips, including the Core i9-12900K — which AMD says is 30% slower than one of the company’s pre-production Ryzen 7000 processors in a Blender multi-threaded rendering test. Intel is also expected to release 13th-generation Core processors later this year (‘Raptor Lake’), which will be manufactured on the same 7nm process as the i9-12900K.

Source: AMD, The Verge