At CES back in January, AMD announced that while Ryzen 6000 laptops were on the way, desktops were going to skip that generation and go right to Ryzen 7000. While various details have been announced along the way, the company announced all of the details today. You'll be able to buy any of four SKUs on September 27, ranging from $299 to $699.

Starting with some of the highlights, AMD says that it outperformed its goals for Ryzen 7000. It was looking to boost IPC (instructions per clock) by 8-10%, and it actually got to 13% over Zen 3. The firm is also saying that the new Ryzen 9 7950X, which sits at the top of the lineup, offers 57% better content creation performance than an Intel Core i9-12900K.

“The AMD Ryzen 7000 Series brings leadership gaming performance, extraordinary power for content creation, and advanced scalability with the new AMD Socket AM5,” Saeid Moshkelani, senior vice president and general manager, Client business unit, AMD. “With the next generation Ryzen 7000 Series Desktop processors, we are proud to uphold our promise of leadership and continuous innovation, delivering the ultimate PC experience for gamers and creators alike.”

As you'd expect, AMD brought out the benchmarks

That's not all though. AMD compared its processor gen-over-gen, saying that the Ryzen 9 7950X has a 32% boost in DOTA 2, a 35% boost in Shadow of the Tome Raider performance, a 6% increase in Borderlands 3 performance, and a 13% increase in CS:GO performance over the Ryzen 9 5950X.

AMD Ryzen 7000 family

AMD didn't just compare its new processors to Intel in content creation. It says that its Zen 4 cores are the best for gaming, a somewhat common claim for new desktop processors that Intel is sure to make when it launches 13th-gen next month. It pointed to Geekbench 5.4 single-thread scores. Where a Core i9-12900K came in at 2,040, a Ryzen 5 7600X came in at 2,175, and the Ryzen 9 7950X came in at 2275.

The company went so far as to say that the Ryzen 5 7600X, on average, offers 5% better gaming performance than a Core i9-12900K.

But what about everything else?

Obviously, speeds and feeds just tell you about, well, speeds and feeds. The Ryzen 9 7950X offers 16 cores with 32 threads, a boost clock of up to 5.7GHz, a total cache of 80MB (the L2 cache has been doubled), and a 170W TDP. Yes, that's a significant boost in TDP, but AMD is promising a big boost in efficiency.

AMD Ryzen 7000 processor

With the new TSMC 5nm process as part of Zen 4, AMD has shrunken down the Core + L2 area to 3.84 square millimeters, while Intel's is 7.46 square millimeters on the Intel 7 process (Alder Lake). With that, AMD is promising 1.47 times the performance per watt of Intel, a company promising to have the industry lead in performance per watt by 2025.

Model

Cores/Threads

Boost / Base Frequency

Total Cache

PCIe

TDP

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X

16C / 32T

Up to 5.7 / 4.5GHz

80MB

Gen 5

170W

AMD Ryzen 9 7900X

12C / 24T

Up to 5.6 / 4.7GHz

76MB

Gen 5

170W

AMD Ryzen 7 7700X

8C / 16T

Up to 5.4 / 4.5GHz

40MB

Gen 5

105W

AMD Ryzen 5 7600X

6C / 12T

Up to 5.3 / 4.7GHz

38MB

Gen 5

195W

Other important improvements are support for DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.0, both of which are already supported by Intel's latest generation of chips. One key difference, however, is that Ryzen 7000 only supports DDR5 memory. The company says that after so much time, DDR4 is at the end of its life.

It's fair to say that the death of DDR4 has been dragged out a bit, thanks to component shortages that kept DDR5 prices high, and the fact that in this early stage of DDR5 evolution, there wasn't that much of an advantage. The advantage simply wasn't enough to cover the difference in price.

AMD sees that as changing, so it's going with DDR5. It's also announcing Expo memory, which is optimized for AM5 boards and can be overclocked. These are going to arrive from companies like ADATA, Corsair, Kingston, and more in November. There will be more than 15 kits available at launch, coming in at speeds of up to DDR5-6400.

The new AM5 platform, guaranteed to be used through at least 2025

Unlike Intel, which seems to rarely allow a CPU socket to last more than two generations at this point, AMD has boasted future-proofing as one of its value propositions. The AM4 socket has been around for over five years and lasted through five CPU architectures. It actually predates the Zen architecture and the Ryzen brand.

AM5 motherboard with AMD Ryzen processor

It's time for AM5, which includes a 1718 pin LGA socket, including up to 230W socket power delivery. Most importantly though, it's meant to be future-proofed, including DDR5 and PCIe 5.0.

PCIe 5.0 offers double the bandwidth of its predecessor. That means faster SSDs, which is great when we're talking about things like DirectStorage. But along with other things, it can get you faster graphics. AMD has four platforms out of the gate: X670, X670 Extreme, B650, and B650 Extreme. They all offer PCIe 5.0 storage, but the Extreme options also offer PCIe 5.0 graphics.

The AM5 platform does support AM4 coolers, so while you'll have to swap out your board, you should be able to keep your cooler.

As for how long AMD is planning to use AM5, it should be for at least three more years. The firm is promising to use the new platform until at least 2025.

AMD Ryzen 7000 pricing and availability

You'll be able to pick up an AMD Ryzen 7000 processor beginning on September 27. There are four SKUs, with the following pricing:

Ryzen 9 7950X

Ryzen 9 7900X

Ryzen 7 7700X

Ryzen 5 7600X

$699

$549

$399

$299

AMD Ryzen 7000 processors with the company's new 3D V-Cache are going to be available later in 2022, but there's no specific date yet.