Two years after it released the Ryzen 5000 chips, AMD is ready to announce a successor series. The firm announced pricing and availability for the first wave of Ryzen 7000 CPUs based on the Zen 4 architecture. It also announced details about the accompanying AM5 platform and the performance increases that early adopters can expect.
The first four Ryzen 7000 CPUs will be available on September 27. AMD is using the same strategy it used to launch the 5000 series. The new series will start with four higher-end, higher-priced parts, while lower-end CPUs for mainstream and budget builds will follow next year. If you are wondering why it is labelled Ryzen 7000 instead of 6000, it is because 6000-series CPUs are only available for laptops.
According to the tech website Arstechnica, AMD is sticking to the same core counts it used for Zen 3. The entry-level model is the 6-core Ryzen 5 7600X, launching for the same $299 that the 5600X cost in 2020; the 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X is also launching for $549, the same price as the Ryzen 9 5900X. The other two chips are a little cheaper than their Ryzen 5000 counterparts; the 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X launches for $699, $100 less than the 5950X, while the 8-core Ryzen 7 7700X starts at $399, $50 less than the launch price for the Ryzen 7 5800X (technically, this is a price increase over the $299 Ryzen 7 5700X, but that chip wasn’t released until nearly a year and a half after the 5800X).
According to AMD, tweaks and optimizations made over the course of Zen 4’s development have boosted its instructions-per-clock (IPC) increase over Zen 3 to an average of 13 percent. This is more than the 8–10 percent increase the company promised earlier this year. The maximum clock speed of the 7950X has been boosted to to 5.7 GHz, 800 MHz faster than the boost clock of the Ryzen 5950X. All in all, this should make the 7950X 29 percent faster than the 5950X, especially at tasks that require single thread performance like games.
