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Power Consumption and Efficiency Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X
AMD worked with TSMC to tune the 5nm process for its design goals, resulting in a specialized 15-layer N5 process node. Unfortunately, we don’t know the specifics of the custom node. However, TSMC’s N5 generally provides 15% more performance at a given power level, or 20% lower power consumption at any given clock rate compared to the 7nm process that AMD used for its previous-gen Ryzen 5000 chips. Paired with the Zen 4 architectural advances and SoC improvements, AMD says Ryzen 7000 delivers up to 40% more performance-per-watt at its standard TDP levels.
| Header Cell - Column 0 | 65W TDP | 105W TDP | 170W TDP |
|---|---|---|---|
| Socket Power (PPT) Watts | 88W | 142W | 230W |
| Peak Current (EDC) Amps | 150A | 170A | 225A |
| Sustained Current (TDC) Amps | 75A | 110A | 160A |
AMD has defined a new 170W TDP range, a new high for the mainstream Ryzen family. AMD has also increased the base TDP for the Ryzen 9 models by 65W and increased Ryzen 5 by 45W. Additionally, the peak power consumption (PPT) for the AM5 socket is now 230W. That's a significant increase over the previous-gen Ryzen 5000's 142W limit.
AMD also increased the TDC and EDC amperage significantly, raising EDC by 60A and 30A for the 65W and 105W TDP ranges, respectively. We see smaller 15A increases to the EDC for both the 65W and 105W TDP tiers.
AMD says that it improved the platform power interface from SVI2 to SVI3, allowing it to move from two variable power rails to three, thus enabling better control of the power delivery to the socket. The SVI3 interface provides continuous and more accurate telemetry for voltage, current, power, and temperature for multiple onboard voltage regulators, while SVI2 didn’t allow monitoring of power and temperature. SVI3 also enables enhanced power states that help save power, like phase shifting (shutting off phases when not needed).
The culmination of these power delivery improvements is that AMD can unlock higher levels of performance that stretch beyond IPC gains. Above we plotted the clock speed for the Ryzen 9 7950X and previous-gen 5950X on the left-hand side of the chart as we slowly loaded the cores with a Prime95 SSE workload (this draws more peak power than the AVX tests). As you can see, the 7950X maintained 5 GHz with all cores loaded, but the 5950X dropped to 3.4 GHz.
We also plotted the power on the right-hand side of the chart. As you can see, the Ryzen 9 5950X reached its peak power consumption with six cores loaded, after which power plateaued until we loaded ten cores. It then began to decline as we worked our way up to loading all 16 cores. This is a known tendency for the 5950X – socket power limitations apparently resulted in uneven power/voltage delivery at higher power levels, thus requiring the chip to dial back its frequency after reaching a certain threshold.
In contrast, the Ryzen 9 7950X continues to consume increasing amounts of power until 12 cores are loaded. Power consumption only declines slightly after that, and the clock reductions are far less severe. The end result is higher clock frequencies during nearly all loading conditions, which helps enable the massive performance boosts we saw in our test suite.
As expected, our power measurements find the Ryzen 7000 chips drawing significantly more power than the previous-gen Ryzen 5000 models, and that’s by design. Despite Ryzen’s gen-on-gen increase in power consumption, Intel’s Alder Lake processors still consume more power while delivering less performance.
The renders-per-day-per-watt charts show that the Ryzen 5 5600X is more power efficient than the Ryzen 5 7600X in the x264 HandBrake workload, but the stock Ryzen 9 7950X basically matches the prior-gen Ryen 9 5950X. However, as we know from our benchmarks, the 7950X is much faster than the 5950X in this specific workload, which we can see below.
Here we take a slightly different look at power consumption by calculating the cumulative energy required to perform x264 and x265 HandBrake workloads, respectively. We plot this 'task energy' value in Kilojoules on the left side of the chart.
These workloads are comprised of a fixed amount of work, so we can plot the task energy against the time required to finish the job (bottom axis), thus generating a really useful power chart.
Remember that faster compute times, and lower task energy requirements, are ideal. That means processors that fall the closest to the bottom left corner of the chart are the best. Overall, AMD traded power efficiency for outright performance with its halo Ryzen 9 7950X. As always, the last few percentage points of performance often come at the expense of double-digit percentage increases in power consumption.
- MORE: Best CPUs for Gaming
- MORE: CPU Benchmark Hierarchy
- MORE: AMD vs Intel
- MORE: Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 All We Know
- MORE: Raptor Lake All We Know
