In regards to performance, AMD is touting an average (geomean) IPC increase in desktop workloads for Zen 5 of 16%. And with the new desktop Ryzen chips’ turbo clockspeeds remaining largely identical to their Ryzen 7000 predecessors, this should translate into similar performance expectations for the new chips.
The AMD Ryzen 9000 series will also launch on the AM5 socket, which debuted with AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series and marks AMD’s commitment to socket/platform longevity. Along with the Ryzen 9000 series will come a pair of new high-performance chipsets: the X870E (Extreme) and the regular X870 chipsets. The fundamental features that vendors will integrate into their specific motherboards remain tight-lipped. Still, we do know that USB 4.0 ports are standard on the X870E/X870 boards, along with PCIe 5.0 for both PCIe graphics and NVMe storage, with higher AMD EXPO memory profile support expected than previous generations.
↫ Gavin Bonshor at AnandTech
I absolutely love that AMD maintains compatibility with its chipset and socket generations as well as it does. I’m currently running a Ryzen 9 7900X, and I see no reason to upgrade any time soon, but it’s good to know I’ll at least have otions once the time comes. Compare this to Intel, which broke compatibility pretty much intentionally almost every generation for years now, and this is a huge win for consumers.
Of course, as AMD regains more and more of its foothold across the market, it will eventually also resort to the kind of tactics Intel has been using while it pretty much had the market to itself. It’s only a matter of time before we’ll see the first new Ryzen generation that mysteriously requires a new socket or chipset out of the blue.
What do you mean there was no clock bump?
Comparing the Ryzen I have (the Ryzen 5 7600) or the current “what I’ll upgrade to if I suddenly develop a need tomorrow” (the Ryzen 9 7900) shows that they’ve upped the max boost clock that I’m aware of at 65W TDP by 0.1GHz. 😛
(Seriously, though. The 9700X will probably replace the 7900 as my “if I need more CPU tomorrow” CPU. 16% more IPC and only increasing the core count by two is more attractive than doubling the number of cores, given that the bottlenecks on my system are still things like “I’ve optimized my Rust toolchain so much that 50%+ of the time an incremental rebuild takes is now that single-threaded rustc frontend they hope to fix within the next year” or “Just as with how I’d buy dual-core chips in the pre-turbo boost era, performance of emulators at 65W TDP is my biggest deciding factor”.)
…granted, part of the very satisfying performance I enjoy comes from slapping a Noctua cooler on the CPU to get rid of the irritating tonal quality the stock cooler has, and receiving the ability to indefinitely (stress-ng –cpu 12) boost-clock all six cores to 4.9GHz out of their rated maximum potential 5.1GHz.
There are pros and cons to staying on the same chipset.
But I am still waiting for motherboard manufacturers to actually provide more than one 16x PCIe support at the same time. What would be even better? ECC RAM on the desktop / HEDT segment.
Take Intel z790 for example (their top of the line chipset, until z890 finally comes out):
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/229721/intel-z790-chipset/specifications.html
Can easily support 28 (chipset) + 20 (CPU) PCIe lanes. But I have not been able to find any motherboard that supports two GPUs at full x16 range. Some report even using m.2 drives would have their primary and only GPU to cut down to x8 data lanes.
On the AMD side, I was able to find a reference to a single motherboard that does this in the past, but cannot recall it now.
This should have been fixed long time ago.
sukru,
I want more flexibility here too. If one devices uses up 16 lanes, there’s not enough for much else. PCI5 could help make up for the loss of lanes by doubling the bandwidth, but all of my hardware is PCI gen4. 2X 16 lanes would be nice. In my case I needed 3X 8 lanes, but couldn’t get it without going to a server.
If you go with server CPUs, you get way more pcie lanes…According to this xeon 3rd gen has 64 lanes, 4th gen has 80.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/processors/xeon/3rd-gen-xeon-scalable-processors-brief.html
https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/central-libraries/us/en/documents/2023-09/4th-gen-xeon-revised-product-brief.pdf
AMD Epyc “up to?” 128.
https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/4th-gen-epyc-processor-architecture-white-paper.pdf
And that gets you ECC ram too, and more RAM channels. Obviously you;ll end up paying more for it, but if you really want it the hardware exists. I’ve used xeon CPUs in my workstations. (Do I recall Thom Holwerda’s current system being a xeon?) The problem with server grade hardware is that everything typically gets derated. Unless you have applications that use all those cores, you might end up sacrificing performance compared to high end consumer desktops (The high core monsters are usually not great at gaming).
Alfman,
(A bit of late but)
I checked the latest used market on eBay.
It seems possible to get a “fully loaded” Epyc server for ~$3000:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/285884734248
(For posterity: Supermicro AS-2113S-WN24RT H11SSW-NT AMD Epyc 7702 64GB 24x 2.5″ NVMe 2U Server with a single CPU, so yes not fully loaded)
Or a bare bones for ~$960:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/296425332501
However looking at the specs, the Epyc 7702 has abysmal single core speeds, which is beat easily by latest desktop processors from AMD, and even in multi core, very close by Intel.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/3719vs5022vs5031/AMD-EPYC-7702-vs-Intel-i9-13900K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-7950X
This tradeoff is unfortunately always there:
1 – I/O
2 – Compute
3 – RAM
4 – Price
“Choose two”
I am sure we will see new chipsets or sockets at some point for any number of reasons. It is not as clear to me though that we need to start painting AMD with the monopolistic brush quite yet.
Setting aside their moral character, are we sure that AMD is going to dominate Intel so completely that AMD starts abusing their position in the market? That seems a bit unlikely for starters. Are we then also so sure that the market backdrop will be one that allows the x86 leader to act with impunity?
I see both ARM and RISC-V putting real pressure on the x86 space both on the server ( cloud ) and the desktop ( or at least laptop ). With both Apple Silicon and the new Snapdragon X Elite lines out there, the laptop space could become quite competitive I think. Is the desktop that far behind?
The SBC and embedded spaces are already lost ( to x86 ). Will the SBC market grow into the tablet, laptop, and desktop spaces? Probably.
On the server, I would argue that x86 is already losing ground. Look at what is happening with AI and the Cloud. Is all that compute being done on x86? Not really. And there are many ARM and RISC-V companies due to launch in the not so distant future that have cloud computing in general in their sights.
AMD does not seem to be in a very good spot to lay back getting fat and happy. At least, not in my view.
Writing these words on i3-2125 I feel yet another urge for an upgrade. Maybe this summer…