As you know Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X, AMD has released its first four new Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 series “Raphael” processors. We’ve collected all of the most relevant performance benchmarks and info into this article to give you a broader view. The Zen 4 lineup touts the 16-core $699 Ryzen 9 7950X flagship, which AMD claims is the fastest CPU in the world, to the six-core $299 Ryzen 5 7600X, the lowest bar of entry to the first family of Zen 4 processors. According to our benchmarks, these chips deliver market-leading performance, and that’s a needed return to form.

AMD’s previous-gen Ryzen 5000 processors accomplished what was once thought impossible: The chips unseated Intel’s best in every CPU benchmark, including taking the top of our list of best CPUs for gaming, as the company outclassed Intel’s Rocket Lake in every regard.

But then Alder Lake happened. Intel’s new hybrid x86 architecture, featuring a blend of big and powerful cores mixed in with small efficiency cores, pushed the company into the lead in all facets of raw performance and even helped reduce its glaring deficiencies in the power consumption department. But, perhaps most importantly, Alder Lake started a full-on price war with Intel’s new bare-knuckle approach to pricing, particularly in the mid-range that serves as gamer country.

AMD Ryzen 7000 Zen 4 Specifications

But AMD isn’t standing still, and its Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 series have taken the race for performance led to the next level. Ryzen 7000’s frequencies stretch up to 5.7 GHz – an impressive 800 MHz improvement over the prior generation – paired with an up to 13% improvement in IPC from the new Zen 4 microarchitecture. The chips also come loaded with new tech, like a new integrated Radeon RDNA 2 graphics engine and support AI instructions based on AVX-512.

Here’s a quick preview of how the Zen 4 chips stack up to Intel’s Alder Lake, based on our own more extensive tests that you’ll see below. Going head-to-head with Intel’s Core i9-12900K in 1080p gaming, the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X is 5% faster. In threaded applications, the 7950X is a whopping 44% faster than the Core i9-12900K, and the two chips effectively tie in single-threaded benchmarks.

The Zen 4 Ryzen 5 7600X is equally impressive, being 12% faster than the $289 Core i5-12600K in 1080p gaming, with the lead narrowing to 6% after overclocking both chips. More impressively, the stock 7600X is 4% faster than Intel’s flagship Core i9-12900K in gaming, bringing a new level of value to the $300 price point — with the caveat that you’ll have to deal with higher platform costs.

Both chips beat Intel’s flagship in gaming. However, as impressive as they are, they aren’t perfect: The Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 series has a high $300 entry-level price point and only supports pricey DDR5 memory instead of including less-expensive DDR4 options like Intel. That muddies the value proposition due to the expensive overall platform costs. AMD also dialed up power consumption drastically to boost performance, inevitably resulting in more heat and a more power-hungry system. You do end up with more performance-per-watt, though.

Ryzen 7000 takes the lead convincingly, but its real competitor, Raptor Lake, doesn’t come until next month. Nevertheless, Intel claims its impressive performance gains of 15% faster single-threaded, 41% faster threaded, and a 40% ‘overall’ performance gain, meaning we’ll see a close battle for the desktop PC leadership.

AMD Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 Series

• Codename Raphael, the first four models launched on September 27
• Up to 16 cores and 32 threads on TSMC 5nm process (N5 used for compute die)
• 5.7 GHz peak clock speed
• Ryzen 9 7950X, Ryzen 9 7900X, Ryzen 7 7700X, and Ryzen 5 7600X at launch
• 6nm I/O die, DDR5 memory controllers, PCIe 5.0 interface
• DDR5 only (no DDR4 support), up to 125% more memory bandwidth per core
• RDNA 2 integrated GPU (present on IOD, very basic and low power)
• Zen 4 architecture has a 13% IPC gain
• AM5 Socket LGA 1718, backward compatible with AM4 coolers
• 600-Series Chipset: X670E Extreme, X670, B650E Extreme, and B650 Motherboards
• up to 170W TDP, 230W peak power
• Support for AVX-512, VNNI
• At least one 3D V-Cache Zen 4 model will come to market this year

AMD Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 Series Release Date

The first four Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 processors arrived on September 27, 2022, accompanied by the high-end X670 and X670E chipsets, while the B650E and the B650 chipsets will arrive in October. New EXPO (EXtended Profiles for Overclocking) DDR5 memory kits are also available, but PCIe 5.0 SSDs will come to market in October.

The Ryzen 7000 chips will mark just the first step of the Zen 4 journey as the company delivers on its CPU roadmap and brings them to the desktop and notebook markets. AMD will also use the Zen 4 architecture for its data center CPU roadmap.

Overall, we see the same core counts as the previous-gen models but 16% to 17% higher clock rates across the new range of Ryzen 7000 SKUs. In addition, the chips all have more L2 cache but the same L3 cache capacity. 

The 16-core 32-thread Ryzen 9 7950X is $100 less than the original launch pricing of the Ryzen 9 5950X,  while the 12-core 24-thread Ryzen 9 7900X has the same launch pricing as its predecessor, the 5900X.

However, AMD raised the launch pricing of the eight-core 16-thread Ryzen 7 7700X by $100 over the 5700X. AMD also kept the entry-level pricing at the same $299 with the Ryzen 5 7600X, but that isn’t a complete win – this same high entry-level pricing wasn’t well-received with the Ryzen 5000 family. There’s no mention of a Ryzen 7 7800X to replace the outgoing 5800X. Perhaps AMD is leaving a spot for its V-Cache-enabled X3D model here.  

AMD Ryzen Clock Rates

As you can see, AMD has increased clock speeds across the breadth of its four new SKUs, a benefit of both the 5nm process and an architecture tuned for higher clock rates. For instance, the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X will have a 16% higher clock rate than the Ryzen 9 5950X, with its 5.7 GHz boost clock rate marking an incredible achievement for a 16-core chip — that’s 800 MHz faster than its predecessor, setting a record as the largest frequency increase in the Ryzen era. The Ryzen 9 7900X is also impressive, with the 12-core chip also featuring an 800 MHz clock speed improvement.

As with all of AMD’s latest chips, that will only occur on two cores: AMD has confirmed that Ryzen 7000 still features Precision Boost 2 to expose the maximum boost frequencies possible at all times. We also know that Intel’s Raptor Lake will boost to 5.8 GHz, though, and perhaps higher.

AMD has also bumped up its TDP ratings, with a 65W increase in the base TDP for the Ryzen 9 models and a 45W increase for the Ryzen 5. The Ryzen 7 7700X doesn’t see a TDP increase. 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. We have a further breakdown of AMD’s new TDP ranges in a section below.

AMD Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 vs Intel 13th-Gen Raptor Lake

Intel’s Alder Lake Core i9-12900K is faster in most workloads than the current Ryzen flagship, but its next-gen 13900K adds in eight more E-Cores, which will deliver substantially more performance in heavily-threaded workloads. Intel has also sprinkled in four more e-cores for its 13700K and 13600K. 

Intel has also brought E-cores to its value-centric 13400 SKU for the first time, which will make for a significantly more competitive chip on the lower end of the market where AMD isn’t nearly as competitive. Again, pricing and performance are the wild cards, and Intel has yet to make any official announcements. However, it is clear that Intel will use a combination of higher clock speeds and more E-Cores to combat Ryzen 7000. 

In many respects, this generation of chips finds the Zen 4 vs Intel Raptor Lake competition returning to an outright frequency war, with both chipmakers pushing their consumer chips to the highest clocks we’ve seen with their modern offerings. That also brings higher power consumption, and we also see higher TDP figures from both chipmakers as they turn up the frequency dial. Naturally, higher peak power figures will be more useful in threaded workloads, so we can expect more from each core with the Zen 4 processors. 

AMD ZEN 4 RYZEN 7000 INTEGRATED GRAPHICS

All Ryzen 7000 chips will support some form of graphics, so it doesn’t appear there will be graphics-less options, like Intel’s F-series, for now. The RDNA 2 engine resides on the IOD (I/O Die) and supports up to four display outputs, including DisplayPort 2 and HDMI 2.1 ports, and Ryzen 7000 has the same video (VCN) and display (DCN) engine as the Ryzen 6000 ‘Rembrandt” processors. Even though all Ryzen 7000 chips will have baked-in iGPUs, the company will still release Zen 4 APUs with beefier iGPUs. The company will also bring its Smart Shift ECO tech, which allows shifting the graphical work between the iGPU and a discrete GPU to save power, to the Ryzen 7000 models for the desktop PC.

AMD has tried to temper expectations for the integrated graphics engine, pointing out that the RDNA 2 graphics are only designed to ‘light up’ displays, cautioning that we shouldn’t expect any meaningful gaming performance. The RDNA 2 iGPU comes with two compute units, 4 ACE, and 1 HWS, so that should be pretty apparent.

We tried a few games anyway, which you can see if you flip through the album above, and the results weren’t pretty. We couldn’t get Far Cry 6 to load, for instance, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider could render the benchmark at 1280×720 but wouldn’t run at 1080p. Much like Intel’s graphics, we were treated to a slideshow in the few games that did run. The bar charts don’t do the poor results enough justice — check out the frametime over time charts for perspective on just how badly the iGPU performs in gaming.

The integrated graphics do have appeal for troubleshooting and OEM systems, though, and it has a few other redeeming qualities. The iGPU supports AV1 and VP9 decode, H.264 and HVEC encode and decode, USB Type-C with DisplayPort Alt Mode, DisplayPort 2.0 (adaptive sync, DSC, UHBR10, HDR), and HDMI 2.1 (HFR, 48Gbps FRL, DSC, HDR10+, and VRR). You also get support for 4K60 and hybrid graphics.

AMD Zen Core and CCD Codenames

There is an open question, though: Will AMD bring Zen 4 designs to the older AM4 motherboards? We’ve seen no concrete indications that this will happen in the near future, and it certainly wouldn’t make sense until after the full gamut of AM5 Ryzen 7000 chips are released — as a business, it would be a poor decision to undercut your premium products before they’re even launched. Will Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 models for AM4 motherboards come later? Time will tell. 

We won’t have to wait long to see how official pricing stacks up — the 5nm Zen 4 Raphael Ryzen 7000 chips and the accompanying 600-series ‘X’ chipsets are due to launch on September 27. We’re sure to learn much more then, so check back for updates, which we’ll add to this article regularly. 

Asus just leaked AMD’s unannounced Ryzen 7000 laptop CPU