AMD announces its new Ryzen 7000-series CPUs are now faster than we all thought

pcgamer.com:

AMD has today taken the wraps off its new Ryzen 7000-seres CPUs, claiming higher than expected performance for its new Zen 4 processors. It also promised the best gaming CPU will land on September 27 for $699. That's the 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen 9 7950X, and, contrary to the earlier pricing rumours, that puts it a full $100 below the original price of the similarly specced Zen 3 Ryzen 9 5950X.

The initial gen-on-gen performance boost for the new Zen 4 CPUs was between 8 and 10% instructions per clock (IPC) increase, but the biggest surprise of today's keynote at AMD's Austin tech day is the upwards adjustment of that number to ~13%. 

For contrast, the 19% IPC boost for Zen 3 over Zen 2 was called «historic» at the time, and this isn't a million miles off that. For something that was suspected might be a bit more iterative in terms of performance gains that's not looking bad.

Obviously, we're relying on normalised metrics, and a geomean score across multiple different benchmarks—both computational and gaming—so that still has to be taken with a touch of salt until we get the different chips into our own test rigs for  a proper CPU playtest.

For us gamers the single threaded metrics are arguably more important than an ephemeral IPC increase, and AMD is also adjusting the previous 15% total single threaded performance gain(opens in new tab) up to 29%. That's almost double, though that number is taken from a Geekbench test compared to a 5950X chip, rather than anything actually gaming related.

But AMD isn't just promising stellar gaming performance on its most powerful, highest spec processor, at today's event in Austin Dr. Lisa Su also demonstrated just how far ahead of Intel's Core i9 12900K its lower-end Ryzen 5 7600X is