AMD is launching its first Zen 5 desktop processors in July, with the Ryzen 9 9950X flagship leading the pack as \u201cthe world\u2019s most powerful desktop consumer processor.\u201d Based on AMD\u2019s existing AM5 platform, the new Ryzen 9000 series of CPUs include the Ryzen 9 9950X, Ryzen 9 9900X, Ryzen 7 9700X, and Ryzen 5 9600X.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The flagship Ryzen 9 9950X is a 16-core, 32-thread CPU, with 80MB of L2+L3 cache and a 5.7GHz boost clock. AMD is promising around a 16 percent instructions per cycle (IPC) uplift in performance over the previous-generation Ryzen CPUs, with big promises of performance gains in productivity as well as gaming.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a big leap, and we\u2019re very very proud of it,\u201d says Donny Woligroski, senior technical marketing manager for consumer processors at AMD, in a press briefing with The Verge<\/em>. \u201cIt\u2019s a monster. This processor does really well against the competition.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n AMD is promising gains of up to 56 percent in Blender against Intel\u2019s Core i9-14900K with the new flagship 9950X, and even 21 percent in Cinebench 2024. On the gaming side, AMD\u2019s benchmarks show a 4 percent frame rate bump over the 14900K in games like Borderlands 3<\/em>, all the way up to 23 percent better performance in Horizon Zero Dawn<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n At the heart of the 9950X is AMD\u2019s new Zen 5 architecture. It\u2019s still using the AM5 socket, with the usual PCIe Gen 5 and DDR5 support, but there are some updates under the hood to deliver more performance that AMD argues make this not a trivial update. \u201cSometimes there are updates of Zen that are not as fundamental, but Zen 5 is a sweeping update with vastly improved branch prediction for both accuracy and latency,\u201d says Woligroski. \u201cIt\u2019s a really impressive difference, and this delivers up to twice the instruction bandwidth, up to twice the data bandwidth, and up to twice the AI performance of the last gen.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n