After months of speculation and rumors, AMD has finally officially announced the release of its next-gen Ryzen 9000 processors. These processors, named ‘Granite Ridge‘, will be powered by the new Zen 5 architecture and are said to feature significant performance gains over past generations.
It has been confirmed that the new CPUs will be arriving on July 31st, giving you enough time to learn as much as you can about this series and ultimately decide if a Ryzen 9000 processor will be the right choice for your system.
What does ‘Granite Ridge’ have to offer?
‘Granite Ridge’ is set to launch in just under two months, so we wanted to share everything we’ve heard about it, including its apparent performance increase. This series utilizes AMD’s AM5 socket, joining previous AM5-powered CPUs like the Ryzen 7000 ‘Raphael’ and Ryzen 8000 ‘Hawk Point’ series. ‘Granite Ridge’ CPUs will feature up to two Zen 5 chiplets, each of these chiplets will have up to 8 cores, maintaining the maximum configuration of 16 cores and 32 threads.
A feature that sets AMD apart from its main competitor Intel, is its support for simultaneous multithreading; this series will utilize SMT demonstrating an upper hand against Intel’s upcoming Intel Core Ultra 200 “Arrow Lake” processors.
AMD is introducing 4 SKUs today. Below is a list of their names and main specs:
- Ryzen 9 9950X – 16 cores, 170W TDP and boost up to 5.7 GHz
- Ryzen 9 9900X – 12 cores, 120W TDP and boost up to 5.6 GHz
- Ryzen 7 9700X – 8 cores, 65W TDP and boost up to 5.5 GHz
- Ryzen 5 9600X – 6 cores, 65W TDP and boost up to 5,4 GHz
The Ryzen 9000 series will be the first in the AM5 lineup to feature the new Zen 5 architecture. So, despite the updated Zen5 chiplets and changes to the capacitor layout, this series will continue the tried and tested AM5 package, including using the same I/O die as its predecessors.
There seems to be an apparent increase in overall performance for the upcoming Ryzen 9000 processors. The flagship 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X has been reported with a 4% to 23% increase in speed for gaming when compared to the Intel Core i9-14900K. Additionally, it’s been reported that there is a significant difference between these two processors in productivity, with the 9950X outperforming the i9-14900K by 7% to 56%.
On top of the performance increase when compared to Intel series, there also seems to be a difference between the Zen4 and Zen5 architecture. AMD claims that the uplift in the instructions per clock (IPC) for the Zen5 architecture is 16% higher than that of the Zen4 processors. This testing was done by looking at the geometric mean across gaming and productivity tests, and when looking at the results featured in AMD’s press release, we can see a significant improvement for the Geekbench 5.4 AES test and a smaller change for Far Cry 6.
The list below demonstrates the IPC gains of previous AMD generations:
- Zen/Zen+: 52%
- Zen2: 15%
- Zen3: 19%
- Zen4: 13%
- Zen5: 16%
