AMD Zen 5: Everything we know about AMD’s next-gen CPUs

This story is part of our coverage of Computex, the world's biggest computing conference.

AMD Zen 5 is the next-generation Ryzen CPU architecture for Team Red. And after a major showing at Computex 2024, it’s ready for a July launch. AMD promises major performance advantages for the new architecture that will give it a big leap in performance in gaming and productivity tasks, and the company also claims it will have major leads over Intel’s top 14th-generation alternatives.

We’ll need to wait for the release to know for sure how these chips perform, but here’s what we know about Zen 5 so far.

Zen 5 release date and availability

AMD confirmed in January 2024 that it was on track to launch Zen 5 sometime in the “second half of the year,” and backed that up at its Computex 2024 showing, where it promised the first four chips from the Ryzen 9000 generation will launch in July. That will be the Ryzen 9 9950X, the Ryzen 9 9900X, Ryzen 7 9700X, and Ryzen 5 9600X. Additional non-X and X3D variants are expected in the months that follow.

This was a surprise early release and seems likely to be an effort to get ahead of Intel, which is slated to debut its Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake CPUs much later in the year. It also gives AMD a chance to get its CPUs into the new breed of “AI” laptops that many major manufacturers are pushing.

Zen 5 specs

AMD detailed the specifications of the four new Ryzen 9000 processors at Computex 2024, showcasing comparable core counts and clock speeds to the previous generation, while claiming inter-process communication (IPC) uplifts from the new architectural design.

These specs are very comparable to their Ryzen 7000 equivalents, with the same cache quantities, thread counts, and clock speeds. What is different this time around, is power draw. While the top-tier 9950X still has the same 170-watt thermal design power (TDP) of its 7950X predecessor, the other CPUs require far less.

The 7900X was a 170W TDP component, but the new 9900X pulls a mere 120W, and both the 9700X and 9600X are just 65W chips. While the power draw figures may be a little higher in real-world use, this is a notable improvement over their last-generation counterparts, and shows a big uplift in efficiency for the new Zen 5 design.

Unlike Intel’s upcoming Arrow Lake CPUs, AMD has maintained simultaneous multithreading with Zen 5, and has made major improvements in branch prediction accuracy and latency to help improve overall multi-threading performance.

AMD has confirmed that its Zen 5 processors feature the RDNA 3.5 graphics architecture, which should mean even more capable onboard graphics than we saw with Ryzen 7000 CPUs. It’s not likely to be a huge upgrade, but considering we had perfectly passable performance for casual gaming on Zen 4, any upgrade is welcome. Ryzen 8000 APUs are already trying to hammer in the last nails of the entry-level graphics coffin. RDNA 3.5 on Zen 5 will only continue that trend.

AM5 socket

One of the greatest strengths of AMD’s Ryzen processors since their first generation has been in their upgradability. While Intel has typically offered fans two and occasionally three generations of support for any socket design, AMD’s Ryzen platform has been far more expansive. Anyone who bought a high-end motherboard from the Ryzen 1000 generation was able to simply plug in an AMD Ryzen 3000 or even 5000 CPU with a few BIOS updates and continue with the same memory, power, and everything else.

AMD is looking to replicate this with its AM5 socket, which debuted with Ryzen 7000 CPUs in the fall of 2022. Zen 5 uses the same AM5 socket as Zen 4, meaning not only will coolers be compatible, but CPUs will be too. Anyone with an existing X670E, X670, or B650 motherboard should be able to drop in a Zen 5 CPU and receive most of the benefits of the new generation as soon as they are available — though a BIOS update may be necessary.

AMD announced the first two new motherboard chipsets for Ryzen 9000 at Computex 2024, detailing the new x870 and x870E chipsets. Both bring USB4 support as standard, as well as PCI Express 5.0 for both graphics and storage slots. Higher memory frequencies are supported, too, potentially unlocking even greater performance for the next-gen CPUs.

Zen 5 performance

AMD has announced some first-party performance numbers for Zen 5, and they are impressive. These numbers are only from its top-tier Ryzen 9 9950X CPU, and are mostly compared to Intel’s best, but they are impressive so far.

AMD’s Zen 5 CPUs will reportedly enjoy an average instructions per clock increase of 16%, though that can be as much as 35% in certain applications. That ultimately leads to some big increases in productivity performance, with AMD citing numbers as high as a 56% lead against the 14900K in Blender.

That goes for gaming, too, where the 9950X reportedly beats the 14900K (which is roughly comparable to the 7800X3D and 7950X3D), by between 4% and 23%. Local-run AI like the Mistral large language model (LLM) are shown running faster on the new Ryzen CPUs, too.

While we’ll need to wait to test these chips ourselves to know how good they really are, the early numbers look very good indeed.

Here comes AM5

AMD’s Zen 5 is shaping up to be a major launch for Team Red, and it’s gotten out ahead of the competition by a number of months. With Intel not slated to launch its Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake processors until much later this year, we may have several months of AMD absolutely dominating before Intel can swing back. It no doubt will, but can it do so hard enough?

AMD has shown with Zen 5 that it has the potential to be the performance and efficiency leader in productivity and gaming. That’s if it turns out to be true, but AMD’s first-party numbers have been historically relatively accurate compared to the real deal. Look out for our reviews of various Zen 5 components in the coming weeks to find our for sure.

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