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Intel will fight back with Arrow Lake
THIS TIME of the year, companies often put on a show for investors. For AMD, that means official confirmation that we’ll be getting Zen 5 consumer PC processors in 2024 with the Ryzen 9000-series. Not exactly a surprise, but it is good to know that plans are on track. Rumor had it that we would get the first models as soon as April, with the V-Cache variants following in the fall. That now looks optimistic. At the event, AMD representatives confirmed a launch in the second half of the year.
Zen 5 is expected to be a fairly major redesign of the Zen 4 architecture rather than a respin, with better branch prediction, more L1 data cache, and six rather than four ALUs per core, plus other tweaks. It’ll use the AM5 socket, and follow the same basic configuration, with either one or two Core Complex Dies (CCDs), each with eight Zen 5 cores using TSMC’s N4 process. If past form and current expectations pan out, we are looking at an IPC gain of between 10 and 15 percent, but some sources claim as much as 30 percent. We will also see APU versions this year, with RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics with up to 40 Compute Units, which equates to the performance of a Radeon RX 6750XT. Those sound sweet.
AMD hasn’t finished with its existing Zen 4 architecture, though. It has four new 65W desktop APUs based on the Phoenix chip already seen in laptops. The top model is the Ryzen 7 8700G with eight cores, and Radeon 780M graphics (768 shading units, 12 CUs, and ray tracing units), yours for $329. There are two six-core chips, the Ryzen 5 8600G, and 8500G, with either 760M or 740M graphics. These will be $229 and $170 respectively. AMD hails these APUs as having the fastest integrated graphics in the world. In practice, it’s looking roughly 30 percent faster than the old 5000-series APU in early tests, and something of a bargain, offering decent 1080p gaming with no card. The top two models also feature integrated AI hardware, an NPU unit capable of 16 TOPS.
AMD’s CEO Lisa Su gives out the good news: Zen 5 is currently on track
If you’re sticking with an AM4 platform then AMD has a treat: a new V-Cache chip, the Ryzen 7 5700X3D. It’s like the 5800X3D, but only $249. It has the same eight cores, with a fat 96MB of L3 cache on top. The base clock is 3.0Ghz, and the maximum boost is 4.1GHz—both a tad slower than its big brother. It may be on last season’s platform, but that cache still works, as early tests have it hammering an Intel Core i5-13600K. Alongside this are three other new 5000-series AM4 chips aimed at the budget gamer.
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