AMD Ryzen 7000: prices, specs, and release date confirmed

rockpapershotgun.com:

AMD have, at long last, fully unveiled the Ryzen 7000 series of gaming CPUs – specs, pricing, the lot. There’s even a release date, September 27th, which will see AMD launch an initial salvo of four mid-to-high-end chips. These will aim to leapfrog Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake processors, several of which are among the best CPUs for gaming we’ve yet tried, with the aid of a new Zen 4 core design, DDR5/PCIe 5.0 support and some ambitious clock speed boosts.

There’s a lot of deets to sort through, so howzabout we split them up? Here’s everything you need to know about Ryzen 7000, from the new generation’s release plans to its claimed gaming performance and motherboard requirements. You can also watch the full Ryzen 7000 reveal event in the embed above, if you’ve got half an hour free.

First up, here are all four confirmed CPUs so far, from the crowd-pleasing Ryzen 5 7600X to the premier Ryzen 9 7950X. I wouldn’t worry too much a lack of lower-end hardware; AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series launch only involved these chips’ direct predecessors, with cheaper Ryzen 5 models coming later. You can probably expect the same this time around.

It looks like AMD are sticking with their total core/thread count formula: for example, the Ryzen 5 7600X has six cores and 12 threads, just like the Ryzen 5 5600X. However, the 7000 series uses the all-new Zen 4 core, which is based on a more efficient 5nm manufacturing process and can apparently manage up to 13% higher IPC (instructions per cycle – essentially, how many tasks the CPU can execute in one clock cycle).

In something of an Intel-esque move, clock speeds are also much higher across the board, with the Ryzen 9 7950X able to boost itself all the way up to 5.7GHz – that’s even higher than the