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The Phoronix benchmarks show exactly the expected results.
However, there are some sites where the interpretation of similar results is ridiculous, for instance TechSpot.
On that site, the author complains that e.g. 9700X is faster than 7700X in the multi-threaded benchmarks by only a few percent. Nevertheless, the author fails to mention that 7700X is configured for an 105 W TDP, while 9700X is configured for a 65 W TDP.
For most of the new series, AMD has chosen a default configuration that favors energy efficiency over speed. Therefore, in the default configuration most of the improvements result in a much higher energy efficiency and an only slightly higher speed in multi-threaded benchmarks. The results measured by the reviewer were exactly as expected and the complaints make absolutely no sense.
After that, the reviewer notices that the new series show a lower power consumption by a few tens of watts, but then the reviewer complains that when compared to the entire computer system power consumption that means only around 10%, so it is not impressive.
However, the reviewer fails to point that this computer system includes an RTX 4090, which alone has a power consumption comparable with a couple of normal desktops. The reviewed computer has a power consumption around 500 W, many times greater than a normal desktop computer. Therefore a power saving that would be huge for a normal desktop appears modest for such a behemoth. Again, the complaints are ridiculous.
Moreover, the reviewer fails to notice that in single-threaded benchmarks the new Zen 5 CPUs match or even exceed the fastest Raptor Lake CPUs, despite the latter having much higher clock frequencies. That means that when the faster Zen 5 models will be launched next week, they will beat easily any Intel CPU in single-threaded benchmarks.
These results are excellent, and not a failure, like the weird reviewer concludes.
Moreover, that bad review has not tested the domains where Zen 5 has up to double performance when compared to any previous desktop CPU, like floating-point computations, cryptography or ML/AI. These use cases alone are a good enough reason for upgrades for many of those who use such CPUs for professional purposes and not for games.
Steve's reviews are focused on gaming and he probably isn't wrong there. 9700X seems to bring very little for gaming, compared to 7700X. 7700X is almost the same performance, sometimes even better, and cheaper to buy. Most gamers do not care about 10% lower power consumption, especially when they have to pay more upfront for it.
Yes, the better energy efficiency allows 9700X to boost higher to get somewhat higher performance in multi-thread, but for some reason, gaming does not benefit noticeably. Zen 5 seems interesting for laptops and low-power client devices, but so does the new Intel Lunar Lake (for now, at least), so we have to wait for reviews and comparisons there.
> has not tested... floating-point computations, cryptography or ML/AI.
That is true, but small fraction of people care about these specialized workloads, it's overhyped in marketing. But if you care about those, I think you may be right that Zen 5 may be more interesting there.
I agree that upgrading from Zen 4 to Zen 5 would make very little sense for a gamer.
However this fact was already well known and it has been discussed for some months.
It was not a surprise and verifying this fact is certainly a stupid justification for calling Zen 5 a flop.
Zen 5 does exactly what it has been announced that it will do. It provides a much greater energy efficiency than any previous x86 CPU.
It has a greater single-thread performance at a given clock frequency than any previous x86 CPU, but Arrow Lake S, which is expected in October or November, will have about the same IPC in the big cores, so about the same single-thread performance.
For any application that can use AVX-512 instructions, the desktop variant of Zen 5, i.e. Granite Ridge, can have a double throughput in comparison with any previous desktop CPU. For some people this will not matter at all, but for others this will be decisive.
The same happened at the previous SIMD throughput doublings that happened while keeping the same number of cores, e.g. Sandy Bridge after Nehalem or Haswell after Sandy Bridge.
For some people this did not matter, while for others it was a great improvement.
He also does a test with pbo enabled which brings the power draw inline with the 7700x and it only is 10% better or less.
> Moreover, that bad review has not tested the domains where Zen 5 has up to double performance when compared to any previous desktop CPU, like floating-point computations, cryptography or ML/AI. These use cases alone are a good enough reason for upgrades for many of those who use such CPUs for professional purposes and not for games.
I hope AVX512 dies a painful death, and that AMD starts fixing real problems instead of trying to provide magic instructions to then create benchmarks that they can look good on.
Because absolutely nobody cares outside of benchmarks.
The same is largely true of AVX512 now - and in the future. Yes, you can find things that care. No, those things don't sell machines in the big picture.
I hope AMD gets back to basics: gets their design process working again, and concentrate more on regular code that isn't HPC or some other pointless special case.
I want my power limits to be reached with regular integer code, not with some AVX512 power virus that takes away top frequency (because people ended up using it for memcpy!) and takes away cores (because those useless garbage units take up space).
Stop with the special-case garbage, and make all the core common stuff that everybody cares about run as well as you humanly can. Then do a FPU that is barely good enough on the side, and people will be happy. AVX2 is much more than enough.
In desktop chips I really could not care less if the TDP is 65W or 105W.
AMD has been doing really well on their CPU side the last few years, but with Intel's recent issues at the some time as Zen 5, I have to imagine this is going to be a good time for them going forward.
I remember when AMD was the budget choice that threw raw speed and cores at the problem with CPUs like the FX 83XX chips and Intel was the real player (memories of building my first computer in high school). I love the switch up. I hope Intel can get their comeback as well (without just throwing 240W at the processor). I love some competition in the x86 market.
AMD being good was really jarring when I got back into building PCs a few years ago. I was so used to the Phenom and Bulldozer era, when the consensus was AMD was pretty much a joke. How times have changed..
Phenom was really good. Ran mine for 10 years before getting into Ryzen. But Bulldozer was a letdown.
For non gaming builds, the Phenom processors were a great value. I had a Phenom 2 X6 for running virtualization labs, no issues whatsoever. Bulldozer was a flop, no real performance gains over the Phenom 2's.
Anybody else finding that the need for upgrades slowed down dramatically?
Did a 3700X -> 5800x3D upgrade for a last gasp of AM4 and at this pace I'll probably wait till what zen 6? 7?
Outside of niche areas, I think programmers can easily go at least 5 years without needing an upgrade. The average office worker can probably use recent hardware until it breaks. My 2016 Macbook would be fine for day-to-day work if the battery wasn't completely dead. My current laptop (M1) and desktop (3600) are both 2020 models and fine for most programming tasks.
My wife's PC is a i7-2600 circa 2011. I have the ram maxed out, an SSD, and an nvidia card and for day-to-day stuff you'd never know it wasn't brand new-- seriously. It even runs Windows 11 perfectly with the Rufus modified installer.
If you're chasing FPS in AAA games it's not going to cut it, but it boots in seconds, loads apps quickly, plays streaming video perfectly...
I'm in a similar boat. I'm rocking 3600 that I purchase in Feb 2020. I'd love a reason to upgrade, but I really can't justify it for my personal machine. It still does everything I want faster than I'd like. I'm personally just going to hold off until I need to so I can enjoy a massive improvement in a few years.
Depends on what you are working on.
For Rust and C++ compilation fast CPU/RAM/SSD makes a massive difference, so I'm always eager to upgrade to the latest and greatest.
I'm on an 11 year old CPU :)
The slowest things are videos that lack hardware acceleration. These fancy new video encodings are a form of forced obsolescence IMO.
It's the same across almost all tech. Phones, tablets, laptops, CPUs, GPUs, displays, TVs. Unless you have specific needs at work or chase the most recent games, the need to update almost went away. I'm still on i5-9300 in my laptop and will happily use it till it dies. (Then look at the battery life in the replacement before considering performance at all)
Yep, after Zen 3-4/Alder Lake, we're now in another stagnation cycle like Intel Sandy Bridge brought in 2010-2015.
For casual users, a good test if it's time to upgrade is - has the CPU speed, the memory speed doubled? If not, for most people, it's better to keep your old device.
For competitive gamers, smaller gains make sense, but it gets expensive fast.
What was your opinion on the 5800x3D upgrade? I'm thinking of doing the same transition but haven't really had any performance complaints with my 3700X. I feel like the supply of 5800x3D will probably disappear pretty soon and the close out prices with it. I'm to lazy do a whole platform upgrade.
Same here; at this point I'll probably only upgrade when CAMM2 becomes more widespread
> Anybody else finding that the need for upgrades slowed down dramatically?
It's kinda random for me: at some point I used a Core i7 6th-gen (6700 then replaced the 6700 with a 6700K: long story) for seven years, something insane like that.
Then got a 3700X, upgraded after a year or so to a 7700X and I'm now seriously considering the 9700X (for the lower TDP and +12% on single-core perfs and maybe, at long last, some ECC).
But then I did put a process in place: when I buy a new machine, my wife gets my old one (so she now has the 3700X) and my mother-in-law gets the old-old one (so she's got the 6700K atm).
Basically: I feel good about upgrading my machine because everybody gets a faster machine when I upgrade.
I'll probably add my daughter into the mix too.
I upgraded my 3900 to a 5900, and it is quite adequate for my needs. If the next upgrade means a new motherboard, ram, etc. I can wait until the difference is worth it.
I'll wait for AM6, in 2 years maybe
I use a 3700X and have had no reason to upgrade yet.
I'm still on 2700, crickets. My last upgrade was so I could have 32GB RAM, not better CPU performance.
Ok. The Power Consumption of Ryzen 7 9700x threw me off a bit at the end. I wasn't expecting such a gap b/w i9 14900k.
Competitive Price, leading in most performance matrices with very good power consumption numbers. That really is a Home run.
It would be nice to see the idle power numbers, including the motherboard. A lot of the time I'm using my home PC for light tasks (browsing, listening to music, etc). The idle power is likely to dominate unless doing heavy processing tasks or gaming.
Power consumption can only really be compared at the same performance level (IMO) - though I guess it depends on if you plan to tweak the processor defaults.
One of my biggest bugbears is people using maximally clocked processors (such as the i9) as indicative of power efficiency in general. Processors use way more power for those last few hundred megahertz.
I don't think this release is all that impressive, tbh. Fairly minor upgrade all told, and not an upgrade at all for those of use who value performance more then efficiency (admittedly, you can eke out some small improvement via PBO)
The 14900k is a 24-core CPU. Don't doubt that "efficiency" cores draw current. The e-cores cluster alone can draw over 135W if you push it.
9700X system has materially the same performance and only a little lower consumption than similar 7700X system, which was released 21 months ago. It's stagnation like Intel 2010-2015.
Nice benchmarks. One caveat is - why not publish which motherboard/RAM combination you were using for the review? Looks like they were using an existing AM5 MB - but I don't see it in the review.
It should be on the system table on the 2nd page. Its a bit small but SVG can zoom in. It was an ASUS ROG STRIX X670E with latest BIOS.
Edit: but yeah I need to find a way to scale that table better to make it easier to read.
If you wanted to upgrade from Zen3/4, don't get your hopes up...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF_bMt9fVm0
On average, 9700X is few percent faster than 7700X, and has slightly lower consumption. Upgrading from Zen 3/Zen 4 not warranted.
Depends on the workload. It certainly looks like Zen 5 will be meh for gaming build upgrades. On the other hand, these are great options for productivity and workstation builders.
Check Level1Tech's video. This would be a great generation for Epyc too.
I'm not sure I'd quantify it as "excellent". It's nearly identical to last generation's parts. The only pro so far is the very lower power usage, which is nice.
They are faster than the previous generation in nearly all of the benchmarks while using much less power. I wouldn't call that 'nearly identical'.
I guess thank you apple for finally allowing someone else to use the 3n process. Everyone applauding apple for their incredible silicon, but IMO it's 70% just thanks to tsmc.
These are 4nm.
And 30% soldering RAM on-package.
A bit personal question, but can someone tell me if upgrading a 1800X to a 9700X worth it? Or should I just upgrade the whole enchilada (mobo, RAM)?
You can't upgrade different cpu socket 1800x is am4 and 9700x is am5.
You could upgrade to something like 5800x if needed.
I went 1700x -> 5700x on a lark, because it was really cheap.
I wasn't expecting much & wasn't sure why I was doing it (I do some occasional gaming but my rx580 is almost certainly the bottleneck). I was pleasantly surprised to find my computer noticeably snappier.
There are used 5800x's under $100 on eBay. I would absolutely recommend grabbing one of those. At $200+ (what I paid) it's nice & I was pleasantly surprised, but man, these things were already pretty fast!
I believe the 9700X would require a new board with an AM5 socket and only accepts DDR5 RAM so whole enchilada.
You can upgrade to a much better AM4 CPU for very cheap (used)
Buy a 5700x3d for a cheap upgrade.