AMD to unveil Zen 4 CPUs at CES 2022

[LePhuronn]

Which goes against his claims that it was going to be shown. A gpu has to be pretty nailed down before a company is comfortable live demoing it. The way his article made it sound it was as if 5 mins before they were gonna show it they pulled the plug.

From what I remember, the talk was RDNA 1 was in a position to be shown around the prior September, but something cropped up which pushed the entire project back, and presumably pushed significantly enough to bodge together Radeon VII to fill the gap. Hell, there's even gossip to this day (not that I can find the rumour/source where I saw it) that RDNA 1 still had some kind of bug at a silicon level which was a major contributor to all the black screen driver issues.

Anything that came across as a last-ditch "5 minutes beforehand" thing was either hyperbolic writing (which Adored Jim is perfectly capable of doing), an exaggeration to illustrate a point (also a failing of his) or just interpretation on the part of the reader.

 

[lsg1r]

Yea I get what you mean.

The trouble is with Zen4 is it will need new memory (got plently of DDR4 around) and an costly motherboard. So say £500'ish for the cpu (8-12 cores - 7800x or 7900x), £200~ for 32Gb memory (DDR5 might have come down somewhat) and £300~ for X670.

So £1,000+ for Zen 4, or £500 for an 5950x.

I was hanging off until some news about Zen4. Personally it didnt blow me away (+15% increase, due to 12% clock speed increase?). So I was thinking 5950x would do me for awhile. However after watching linus video, he was saying how great Zen4 was. Started to wonder if I missed something.

Zen4 isn't 'bad', the question is whether it is 'good enough' etc and in all honesty we won't know for a while yet.


As to the 5950x...will you even make use of all the cores it has if you were to buy it, are you doing anything like rendering and/or heavy video editing/encoding. If not you could you get away with say a 5900 or even a 5800x3D imo.

I said this earlier that from a personal standpoint I think I made the right decision going 5950x (based on current info anyway) versus waiting, I'm not sure the extra cost it would entail hits the performance/cost value proposition (I estimate it would have cost £500+ more for the same stuff if ddr5 and zen4). I also have a well established platform with most of the bugs ironed out etc...

Basically I'm waiting until at least 'v2' of zen4 comes out before considering an update and even then I'm not sure I'll 'need' it as my workload (3d rendering) is shifting more towards the gpu than the cpu.

At the end of the day if you do get a 5950x it's not going to turn into a 'slow' cpu overnight

 

[Grim5]

MLID struggling to defend his "leaks" and claims. His performance claims for zen4 are way off what AMD so now he's trying to claim AMD is baiting and under representing its products

 

[Roguey000]

Zen4 isn't 'bad', the question is whether it is 'good enough' etc and in all honesty we won't know for a while yet.


As to the 5950x...will you even make use of all the cores it has if you were to buy it, are you doing anything like rendering and/or heavy video editing/encoding. If not you could you get away with say a 5900 or even a 5800x3D imo.

I said this earlier that from a personal standpoint I think I made the right decision going 5950x (based on current info anyway) versus waiting, I'm not sure the extra cost it would entail hits the performance/cost value proposition (I estimate it would have cost £500+ more for the same stuff if ddr5 and zen4). I also have a well established platform with most of the bugs ironed out etc...

Basically I'm waiting until at least 'v2' of zen4 comes out before considering an update and even then I'm not sure I'll 'need' it as my workload (3d rendering) is shifting more towards the gpu than the cpu.

At the end of the day if you do get a 5950x it's not going to turn into a 'slow' cpu overnight

Thanks for the advice.

I agree the best bang-4-buck would be the 5900x. But if I do a Zen 3 chip, it will be my last AM4 chip. I would rather spend a little more now and get the extra cores (it would bug me in the future that I should have gone a little further and got the extra cores). Sure its an extra £140, but its not too bad.

5800x3D would be good either but for me £400 to lose 4 cores isnt great option for me. Plus its really hard to get one of them!

When I got the 3900x, I wanted the 3950x but couldnt justfy the extra £250 for very little extra. That was simply too much to ask (£500 to £750).

Now we looking at £500 for the 5950x.

I know its a hard question to ask you guys - cos you dont have any more information than me. Its sounds like you have done a similar thing - gone for the 5950x instead of waiting.

The Zen4 key-note did worry me somewhat - no price (chips or motherboards), life-span, lack of 3D cache or talk of IPC gains (just clock-speeds mostly). So many things were 'missed'

 

[g67575]

AM5 still looks to be the way to go for those building a new system, as the platform will allow for probably 2-3 easy CPU upgrades, and LGA1700 will be a dead end after Intel's 13th gen.

 

[cliffy]

MLID struggling to defend his "leaks" and claims. His performance claims for zen4 are way off what AMD so now he's trying to claim AMD is baiting and under representing its products

It is not the first time AMD has under promised and over delivered. Only trime will tell one way or the other. I wont make any final decisions on it till i have seen teh final version details and reviews

 

[g67575]

1644 + 15% = 1890 vs 1997 +5%

Why plus 5%?

Even if Zen 4 offers 20% higher single threaded performance, that would still be within about 1% of the 12900K's performance.

I suppose we need to see benchmarks comparing Zen 3, Zen 4 and Golden Cove all running at 4.0ghz, to really see the performance differences.

I'd put money on Zen 4 being quite overclockable, especially if AMD is already talking about clock speeds of 5.5ghz (presumably not all core).

 

[G J]

Why would any company need to bait and under rep its products to throw its competitors off. I would be think theres loads of corporate espionage and very likely the nVidia/Intel/AMD etc have way more info about each others products then we do or do these Youtube leakers think they only information they have access to is what they leak and speculate on.

The chip shown seemed to be a ES sample so things are not 100% set in stone yet.

 

[lsg1r]

I'd put money on Zen 4 being quite overclockable, especially if AMD is already talking about clock speeds of 5.5ghz (presumably not all core).

It could be the other way round, at least on release. AMD have a higher tdp allowance with zen5 so it's entirely possible that they're literally maxing out the silicon etc to get those high boost clock speeds (basically what intel does) leaving very little if any room for the average home overclocker.

But then at the same time they have got the extreme boards so it could be that some chips won't have any headroom and others might have more... suppose we'll have to wait.

 

[g67575]

I think it's quite notable that AMD hasn't really discussed any major architectural improvements between Zen 3 and Zen 4... Normally, with each Zen generation, AMD likes to discuss IPC improvements. They've at least mentioned increased L2 cache though.

You can see this really clearly here, with each Zen generation:

https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16214/Zen3_arch_3.jpg

One thing they didn't mention at all is USB 4, which has already been confirmed for socket AM5.

 

[RavenXXX2]

AMD Ryzen 7000 "Zen4/Raphael" desktop engineering sample CPU with 16-cores has been spotted - VideoCardz.com

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X engineering sample shown in CPU installation guide? Photos of a new engineering sample make an appearance in MSI’s video. AMD has been eager to share renders and pictures of its mockups of Ryzen 7000 “AM5” package with a brand new integrated heatspreader. However, those...

videocardz.com

 

[Grim5]

AMD Ryzen 7000 "Zen4/Raphael" desktop engineering sample CPU with 16-cores has been spotted - VideoCardz.com

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X engineering sample shown in CPU installation guide? Photos of a new engineering sample make an appearance in MSI’s video. AMD has been eager to share renders and pictures of its mockups of Ryzen 7000 “AM5” package with a brand new integrated heatspreader. However, those...

videocardz.com

Looks like a nightmare for liquid metal application. Gonna need lots of nail Polish

 

[Vince]

Remember when adored also claimed a few years back that radeon vii was only shown because they found a last second bug on rdna that prevented them from showing it. Just happened to have a totally different gpu knocking about just in case, not to mention a company wouldn't dare show a gpu that was in an incredible flakey stage of development.

There could actually be something in this, radeon vii is actually a Instinct MI50 which existed alongside the MI60. It was already available to buy in identical spec in the datacenter long before vii released.

Edit: after further reading this appears to have been covered

 

[g67575]

In a way, it's not that surprising that AMD said 5.5ghz clocks are possible on Zen 4 (5nm EUV), considering that they already launched 5ghz Zen 3 mobile CPUs (6nm EUV) that can clock upto 5.0ghz.

I think AMD will be able to reach similar clocks to Intel, but without the astronomically high power usage.

 

[RavenXXX2]

AM5 CPU installation.

 

[cliffy]

I think it's quite notable that AMD hasn't really discussed any major architectural improvements between Zen 3 and Zen 4... Normally, with each Zen generation, AMD likes to discuss IPC improvements. They've at least mentioned increased L2 cache though.

You can see this really clearly here, with each Zen generation:

https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16214/Zen3_arch_3.jpg

One thing they didn't mention at all is USB 4, which has already been confirmed for socket AM5.

Don't forget though this was not a launch event, more of a sneak peak

 

[Gerard]

AM5 CPU installation.

Their thermal paste video is brilliant!

 

[Grim5]

Funny thing with that video, the zen4 cpu they are using to demonstrate is a 7950x and then they put a 65w stock amd heatsink on it

 

[rumple9]

Seems a massive expense (CPU, MOBO AND RAM) for only a 15% uplift over zen 3

 

[g67575]

I think it will be worth it for people with slow DDR4 RAM kits. Also, for system builders who haven't upgraded in a long time.

I think it will probably make sense just to buy a mid end CPU, then just upgrade when the next gen arrives on AM5. It looks like AMD could have the best DDR5 support also, possibly supporting DDR5 frequencies of 7000-8000mhz.