Andrew Cunningham
AMD’s latest Ryzen processors are here, along with the Zen 4 CPU architecture powering them. And if you don’t want to wade through a bunch of words, tables, and graphs, the short version is: they’re pretty good! Even if we miss the days when AMD prioritized midrange systems as much as high-end systems, and even if Intel’s offerings are more compelling now than they were in 2020 when Zen 3 competed with the fifth consecutive iteration of Intel’s Skylake architecture, there is much to appreciate here.
For those of you willing to read on, this piece will focus on two Ryzen 7000 CPUs. AMD sent us a $299 six-core, 12-thread Ryzen 5 7600X and a $699 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen 9 7950X. These are (respectively) the lowest and highest members of the Ryzen 7000 family as it exists today. (The company also supplied a motherboard and DDR5 RAM, as well as travel and lodging expenses for the Ryzen 7000 unveiling and tech sessions we attended in August.)
We’ll compare both chips to each other and to different members of the Ryzen 5000 and 12th Gen Intel Core CPU families to get an idea of how Ryzen 7000 and Zen 4 improve on their direct predecessors and their competition. If you’re more interested in a high-level overview of the Zen 4 architecture, the AM5 socket and 600 series chipsets AMD is also launching today, and other Ryzen opportunities, that information is available in a separate piece for your reference. and convenience.
