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Spring is synonymous with a breath of fresh air at AMD, which will take the opportunity to deliver seven new processors. In the bundle, there will be the original Ryzen 7 5800X3D as well as three Ryzen 5000 series and three others from the Ryzen 4000 series.
Released almost a year and a half ago (November 2020), the Ryzen 5000 series of processors hit the mark with the public. It must be said that it has proven to be particularly successful, offering leading performance in the application field – what the Ryzen have accustomed us to since the first series – and overtaking Intel in video games. Engraving in 7 nm and polished Zen 3 architecture have thus enabled the brand to market a series that is successful from all points of view.
In the meantime, Intel did not sit idly by and released a 12th generation of Core processors in November 2021 which shook the cards. Competing with AMD’s Ryzen 5000 in the application field, this series again exceeds it in video games, but at the cost of high power consumption, an element that leads to heating that is quite complicated to control.
The picture of this beginning of the year 2022 thus drawn up, it was obvious that AMD had to take something out of its basket to revitalize its sales. This will not go through a new architecture, or at least not immediately, processors based on Zen 4 are not expected before the start of the school year at best. Suddenly, the company of Lisa Sue embroiders as she can to show that she has not said her last word.
It starts with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D announced at the last CES in Las Vegas. This processor is primarily aimed at gamers and intends to position itself as the ultimate solution for this audience. We obviously find the Zen 3 architecture of the classic Ryzen 5800X, as well as the finesse of engraving, but an additional layer of cache is grafted on the chip – hence this notion of 3D referring to a stack of chips. AMD promises significantly increased performance, citing an average gain of around 15% compared to a Ryzen 9 5900X, which would allow the newcomer to overtake the Core i9-12900K in a selection of games. This chip will be marketed from April 20, 2022 at a price of $449.
AMD is also completing its Ryzen 5000 offering with three new processors. The Ryzen 5 5500 and Ryzen 5 5600 will be priced at $159 and $199 respectively. They each house six Zen 3 cores and operate within a 65W power envelope, which is “low” for desktop processors. Supplied with a Wraith Stealth heatsink – a fairly basic model – they differ from each other in their operating frequency, but also in the size of the integrated cache, which is significantly higher on the Ryzen 5 5600. The Ryzen 5 5500 is also limited to PCIe 3, unlike the higher models which all support PCIe 4. A Ryzen 7 5700X is also planned with eight cores and still a power envelope of 65 W; a CPU positioned at $299.
More surprisingly, AMD is taking the Zen 2 architecture of the Ryzen 3000 out of formalin with three processors that take the Ryzen 4000 nomenclature. Until now, this series was intended for laptops and a handful of references for integrators – this series until now only included APUs, i.e. processors with an integrated graphics circuit. It is based on a Renoir architecture, that is to say Zen 2 cores (like on the Ryzen 3000), but with some small optimizations and without the support of PCIe 4.
These three SKUs offer four to six cores and a 65W power envelope. Priced between $99 and $154, they also come with a Wraith Stealth heatsink. Only the Ryzen 5 4600G incorporates an integrated graphics circuit, the other two being devoid of it. A strange choice for these entry-level chips which therefore require the purchase of a dedicated graphics card in addition. Given the price of such a card, the office computer market seems complicated to find.
Finally, owners of old-generation Ryzen equipped with 300 series chipset motherboards will be able to upgrade their configuration with a Ryzen 5000. AMD announces that the first beta BIOSes for a selection of motherboards will be available in April. They will therefore allow the use of Ryzen 5000 processors on these older generation motherboards, with the limitation being limited to PCIe 3 instead of the PCIe 4 supported from the 500 series chipsets. therefore extends the life of the AM4 platform even further, with the 300 Series chipset motherboards being released with the first generation Ryzen in 2017.