AMD Ryzen 7000 Zen 4 CPUs, AM5 Motherboards Launching September 15

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The wait is almost over

Ryzen 7000
(Image credit: AMD)

Thanks to a new announcement from MSI on Weibo, September 15 is the newly confirmed release date for AMD's new Ryzen 7000 processors (codenamed Zen 4), and its associated AM5 platform. AMD itself confirmed a generic Q4 release this year, but MSI is the first to spill the actual release date, which is just a month away.

Ryzen 7000 (Raphael) is AMD's next-generation CPU lineup, intended to replace the well-received but aging Ryzen 5000 series CPUs. Ryzen 7000 will be one of AMD's most significant upgrades yet, featuring the brand new Zen 4 architecture and introducing a brand new socket codenamed AM5 -- AMD's first socket upgrade in 5 years.

Zen 4 will bring a lot of new performance enhancements to the Ryzen platform, featuring 15% better single-threaded performance than Zen 3 and 35% overall better performance, including muti-threaded workloads. Power efficiency has also gone up by 25%.

Zen 4's actual IPC gains are quite small, with 8 to 10% gains over Zen 3, but AMD makes up for this by dramatically improving Zen 4's clock speeds. Ryzen 7000 CPUs are expected to feature peak boost clocks well north of 5GHz, and peaking as high as 5.5GHz.

Zen 4 will also be the first Ryzen architecture with AVX-512 support baked in and full RDNA2 integrated graphics support by default. Previous Ryzen chips were broken down into CPUs and APUs, with the APU variants featuring Vega integrated graphics chips at the cost of L3 cache size. With Ryzen 7000, these limitations will be gone.

Ryzen 7000 also brings the first new socket we've seen from AMD in 5 years, called AM5. In addition, this new motherboard platform brings a host of new connectivity standards to Ryzen, including DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 -- bringing it up to par with Intel's 12th Gen Alder Lake and upcoming 13th Gen Raptor Lake CPUs.

As a result, Ryzen 7000 will feature more memory bandwidth and better connectivity than ever before, thanks to these new standards. Chipsets are also changing, with the baseline model being B650, the midrange transferring to X670, and the flagship variant evolving into X670E.

This will be the first major platform upgrade in years since AMD introduced the first generation Ryzen back in 2017. As a result, builders will need to buy or upgrade the CPU and motherboard to get Ryzen 7000's capabilities. Not to mention buying into the DDR5 ecosystem as well.

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Aaron Klotz
Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

8 Comments Comment from the forums
  • -Fran-
    More than the dates, which have been leaked pseudo-confirmed by several differnt people and sources, I'm more interested in pricing leaks. One of them I saw recetly put the 7700X at around $300 and the 7600X at around $200. That would be really good, but at the same time, it paints* a rather sad picture for AMD: they know they can't compete under 12 cores, which would be reasonable given how Intel is positioning Raptor Lake SKUs using Alder Lake as a reference. The i5 this generation is going to be, more than likely, another great performer in the price to performance category considering the whole platform cost. AMD will need to have a very reasonable entry to AM5 in order to get traction, I'd say.

    All of this to say: I'm happy initial leaks point to low-ish entry price points. This is what competition brings!

    Regards.
    Reply
  • 2Be_or_Not2Be
    -Fran- said:
    More than the dates, which have been leaked pseudo-confirmed by several differnt people and sources, I'm more interested in pricing leaks. One of them I saw recetly put the 7700X at around $300 and the 7600X at around $200. That would be really good, but at the same time, it paints* a rather sad picture for AMD: they know they can't compete under 12 cores, which would be reasonable given how Intel is positioning Raptor Lake SKUs using Alder Lake as a reference. The i5 this generation is going to be, more than likely, another great performer in the price to performance category considering the whole platform cost. AMD will need to have a very reasonable entry to AM5 in order to get traction, I'd say.

    All of this to say: I'm happy initial leaks point to low-ish entry price points. This is what competition brings!

    Regards.

    I look forward to the battle between the two, that's for sure! However, I think the 7000-series will be faster than Raptor Lake, based upon some leaks already. Platform cost won't be much of an issue as both really are new platforms for your typical upgrade (well, maybe not if you went with a new Alder Lake build & you want to upgrade to Raptor Lake). I'm probably going to wait some months before diving in myself. Easier to let others find any serious bugs first. :)
    Reply
  • ottonis
    -Fran- said:
    More than the dates, which have been leaked pseudo-confirmed by several differnt people and sources, I'm more interested in pricing leaks. One of them I saw recetly put the 7700X at around $300 and the 7600X at around $200. That would be really good, but at the same time, it paints* a rather sad picture for AMD: they know they can't compete under 12 cores, which would be reasonable given how Intel is positioning Raptor Lake SKUs using Alder Lake as a reference. The i5 this generation is going to be, more than likely, another great performer in the price to performance category considering the whole platform cost. AMD will need to have a very reasonable entry to AM5 in order to get traction, I'd say.

    All of this to say: I'm happy initial leaks point to low-ish entry price points. This is what competition brings!

    Regards.

    We have a complex market situation.

    On the price-lowering side of the equation are:

    - lower overall demand after huge sales numbers during the Covid19 pandemic

    - accompanied with high(er) production, lower demand pulls prices down

    - fierce competition from Intel may also contribute to lower AMD prices but only if Ryzen 7000 loses performance-wise to Intel

    Price-increasing factors:

    - significant inflation along increased production and transportation costs

    - If Ryzen 7000 has similar or better performance compared with their Intel 13000 counterparts, this will keep its prices high - except if Intel reduces their own prices by so much that it beats AMD on the price-performance ratio significantly, which in turn would force AMD to adapt their prices somewhat.

    So, there are many unknowns here. Get some popcorn and enjoy the show!
    Reply
  • lmcnabney
    DDR5 might kneecap Zen4.

    Alder Lake doesn't require it and neither will Raptor Lake. While DDR5 pushes up bandwidth it is also doubling (or more) the latency. The net result is that pricey DDR5 6000 or 6400 isn't significantly superior to the current speedy DDR4 3400 or 4000 that is relatively cheap. Requiring the DDR5 adds about $100 for every 16GB of RAM you add to the net system price.

    AMD also requires over 100W on all of their 7000 series CPUs, so Intel is no longer the power hog when comparing. I love AMD and was looking forward to building a new system based on Zen4, but DDR5 is going to essentially hand the price/performance crown to Intel.
    Reply
  • PiranhaTech
    I hope AMD will keep the TDP down for the mainstream CPU (I'm okay with it high for the top CPUs)
    Reply
  • thisisaname
    I look forward to buying one sometime after November :unsure: or maybe later :eek:
    Reply
  • g-unit1111
    Wow, the 5000 series is aging already? That's crazy but also shows how fast things move in the tech world.
    Reply
  • PiranhaTech
    g-unit1111 said:
    Wow, the 5000 series is aging already? That's crazy but also shows how fast things move in the tech world.
    I'm surprised as well. I did get the 5900X and hated when the new Intel CPUs... until I saw the TDP.
    Reply