AMD’s Zen architecture revitalised the CPU industry, bringing much-needed competition and higher core counts to consumers everywhere. It’s hard to believe we languished on 4-core Intel CPUs as the top mainstream solution for a full decade, starting with the Core 2 Quad in early 2007 and lasting until the Core i7-8700K launched in late 2017. If you wanted more CPU cores, you had to move to the more expensive LGA2011 HEDT (high-end desktop) platform. AMD kicked that idea to the curb with its first Ryzen 7 CPUs, and we’ve been watching an arms race of escalating core counts and clock speeds ever since.
Round four of Zen is now getting prepped for launch. At Computex and its Financial Analyst Day, AMD spilled the beans on much of what we can expect with the upcoming Ryzen 7000-series CPUs and the Zen 4 architecture. It’s more than just a minor architecture update. Zen 4 comes with a new socket, a PCI Express upgrade, DDR5 memory support, and more. AMD hasn’t backed off, and it plans to make Zen 4 its most competitive solution ever, scaling from low-power laptops all the way to massive supercomputers.
Get your wallets ready for a major upgrade, as Zen 4 looks to be the most significant overhaul of the Ryzen family since its inception.
Gunning for number one
AMD is ready to go after the performance crown once more with its latest Zen 4 family of processors. The Ryzen 9 5950X led in virtually every multi-threaded workload and put up some competitive numbers in gaming performance back in 2020. However, Intel reclaimed the overall lead with its 12th Gen Core Alder Lake processors and the Core i9-12900K in late 2021.
Prior to the 12900K, there were cases where Intel was still a little faster, such as in single-threaded workloads and some games, but Intel needed to get off its comparatively ancient 14nm process node and move into the modern era. Alder Lake did just that, using the rechristened Intel 7 process, then went a step further by including a hybrid architecture with performance cores and efficiency cores to attempt to deliver the best of all worlds.
AMD’s Zen 4 architecture isn’t quite as revolutionary as Alder Lake, sticking with a single all-purpose core architecture rather than taking a hybrid approach, but that’s not a bad thing. Singlethreaded performance still matters, and Zen 4 is targeting a greater than 15 percent improvement in single-threaded workloads. That’s good to hear, as right now, if we look at single-threaded benchmarks, the Core i9-12900K beats the Ryzen 9
