Will AMD's Ryzen 7000 Pricing Hamstring the First 'Zen 4' CPUs?
On paper, AMD’s upcoming Ryzen 7000 series CPU family look like the company’s most robust desktop processors to date. At the same time, at first sight, their prices induce some worries.
The four new Ryzen 7000 chips run the range from $699 for a top-of-the-line, 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X to $299 for a midrange Ryzen 5 7600X six-core. Indeed, these chips largely match the launch prices of their predecessors. But the world has changed since Ryzen 5000 debuted, because that world now contains Intel's 12th Generation "Alder Lake" silicon in its geography.
With these new chips, AMD's Ryzen 7000 prices, in three of four cases, look higher than those of some competing Intel chips. And that premium could end up costing AMD, if these CPUs' performance doesn't make up for the difference in the long run.
Of course, comparing processors based solely off of price is difficult without knowing just how these chips perform in controlled benchmark testing. AMD has teased the tech press a few numbers to suggest how much faster its Ryzen 7000 series chips are. But until we give these processors a workout for ourselves, we can’t know for certain. From the prices alone, however, it would appear AMD is at a significant advantage with its highest-end chip, while its lower-end chips could face stiffer competition.
Let's take another look at the confirmed specs for the first quartet of Ryzen 7000 silicon...
The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and AMD Ryzen 9 7900X come with 16 and 12 CPU cores, respectively. In a head-on comparison, Intel doesn’t truly have anything for the consumer market that matches up perfectly. The Intel Core i9-12900K also has 16 cores, but half of these are the more energy-efficient cores that Intel refers to as E-Cores.
Again, we need to
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