HW News - AMD Ryzen 7000 X3D CPUs, Lower Power Non-X CPUs, & Laptops

AMD will be launching three new models some time in February: the 7800X3D, 7900X3D, 7950X3D. Here’s the slide with all three and their basic specs.

It's not actually confidential anymore.

The 7950X3D has 16 cores and will boost up to 5.7GHz. The combined L2 and L3 cache is 144MB, which is massive for a desktop CPU. For perspective, that’s the same amount of cache as on the Threadripper 3970X CPU.

AMD Ryzen 7000 Lineup | GamersNexus

Down from that is the 7900X3D – 12 cores, 5.6GHz boost, and 140MB of combined cache. That 4MB reduction from the 16-core should just be from having four fewer cores, since each core on Zen 4 has 1MB of L2, meaning the L3 is just as large.

This is the first time AMD is putting the additional cache on anything with more than 8 cores. Some games and professional workloads benefit from the additional cache, but having only 8 cores can limit the overall performance of the CPU; not so much in gaming, but in professional work. With the 12- and 16-core versions, that shouldn’t be a forced tradeoff anymore for beneficiaries of the cache who could also use the cores.

Finally, the 7800X3D is most similar to the previous generation, with 8 cores. Strangely, the listed max boost frequency is only 5.0GHz, and AMD told press this:

“It doesn’t really need to boost super high in order to get that game performance because there’s so much memory on the chip.”

AMD to Press

That could be valid reasoning, and we’ll see once we review them. Cutting the boost by 400MHz versus the 7700X feels a little strange considering that the 12 and 16 cores didn’t get their boost frequencies cut at all. 

That said, Zen 4 adjusts its core frequency opportunistically based on power and thermals. It does this even beyond the listed “max boost,” so we’ll have to see where it lands in reality. As one last oddity on the 7800X3D, AMD didn’t list a proper base clock – it only gave “4.XGHz.” We assume that means it’s not final, but it stuck out to us along with the lower boost. The 7800X3D seems strange and will require a deeper look in the review.

Moving on to power, all three of the new X3D CPUs are set to 120W TDP, falling between the 105W and 170W levels of existing X parts. AMD had this to say:

“We heard you guys, you wanted chips that are more efficient that don’t use a lot of power for no reason.”

AMD to Press

As long as the performance is there to back it up, we won’t disagree. In our Eco Mode testing previously, we found that AMD maintained most of the performance at its mid-step Eco Mode setting. 

As a reminder, AMD’s TDP is not indicative of actual power consumption and is constructed in such a way that AMD can basically arbitrarily decide what the TDP will be and manipulate the formula to hit the number they want.

Back to performance, AMD shared some first party numbers. As usual, we won’t lean into these as we’ll have our own full reviews.

For the 7800X3D, AMD claims 21% higher performance in Rainbow Six Siege, 22% higher performance in Dawn of War III, 23% in CSGO, and 30% more in DOTA2. CSGO and DOTA both tend to be CPU-bound, but in different ways. 3D V-cache doesn’t get fully leveraged in every game, though. In our 5800X3D review, we saw a major uplift in Far Cry 6 vs. the normal 5800X, but only 4% in Three Kingdoms. It just depends on the game.

AMD also showed some comparisons of the 7950X3D versus the Intel 13900K in both games and production workloads.

AMD claims a 13% advantage in Rainbow Six Siege, and a huge 52% in 7-Zip file compression. That last one is so much higher it makes us suspect very specific settings engineered for the biggest delta. Again, don’t read into these numbers too much.

Lower Power Non-X CPUs

AMD announced the 7600, 7700, and 7900. These are lower-power non-X versions of the original lineup, or as AMD said, “We’ve taken the X off.” They’re going to come in at lower prices and lower TDP than the originals, theoretically providing us with what Ryzen 7000 would have been if it launched with more conservative power targets. All three of the new CPUs ship with a 65W TDP and still have an IGP.

First, the R5 7600 is a 6-core CPU with a listed boost of 5.1Ghz for $230. That’s $70 less than the official pricing of the 7600X, and more in line with the way R5 pricing used to be. Giving people a lower cost entry point to AM5 is a good move. This could help users who want to buy a brand new system on a budget but not invest in a technically dead-end platform. Also, the 7600 will come with a Wraith Stealth stock cooler, which is a small value-add by way of not having to spend $20 or $30 on a basic cooler. The Stealth just isn’t very impressive, though.

The R7 7700 is next, with 8 cores and a boost of 5.3GHz. It’s priced at $330, which is also $70 less than its X counterpart. The 7700 will come with a Wraith Prism stock cooler – still not amazing but better than the Stealth. This one will have to work hard to beat the 13600K at the same price point.

Finally, the R9 7900 rounds-out the non-X list with 12 cores and a 5.4GHz max boost frequency for $430 – and it also comes with a Wraith Prism. This one might be interesting based on the pricing and the power limit; a 65W TDP could actually be a real limiting factor for a 12 core CPU. All of these are unlocked, so assuming AMD allows for PBO it will be interesting to see how much performance is actually gated by the lower power target.

All three of these Ryzen 7000 non-X CPUs launch on January 10, with reviews going up a day before on the 9th.

So Many Laptop CPUs

AMD also talked about a ton of laptop CPUs with 7000 series names, but there are so many that it made us have flashbacks to the decoder wheel we were given last year. There are parts using Zen 4 core architecture all the way down to Zen 2. Anyway, here’s the slide with all of the new mobile CPU lines.

The big thing here is that even though they’re all 7000 by name, there will actually be new part numbers for CPUs with older architectures. The third digit tells you the Zen core generation, so 7X2X would be Zen 2 based. It’s not that they’re literally reusing old chips, because there are “Zen 3+” and Zen 2 parts with DDR5 support on a 6nm node with RDNA2 graphics – all things that have to mean these are new silicon. That said, the 7030 series might literally be rebadged, due to use of DDR4 and Vega graphics.

There are models in the 7045 series that scale all the way to 16 cores, but we think the most interesting of all of these are the 7040 series chips.

The 7040 series mobile CPUs will be available in 6 or 8 core versions with 12 RDNA3 compute units, a first for any mobile CPU or APU from AMD. They’re manufactured on a 4nm node, and feature some new dedicated AI silicon with AMD’s new Adaptive AI architecture, XDNA.

Ryzen AI

AMD calls this implementation Ryzen AI, and the company leaned pretty hard into talking about the benefits of this new AI Engine. AMD likened it to when graphics first moved off of general purpose CPUs and onto early specialized GPUs – that’s a big statement. The point being that AMD is making a bet that hardware acceleration for client side AI tasks without bogging down your CPU or GPU will become desirable at some point in the future.

AMD mentioned using this AI Engine for things similar to ChatGPT or DALL-E 2. Neither of those specific projects have open models, so AMD fell back on vague “magical experiences” in video chat applications like Teams.

RDNA 3 GPUs for Laptops

Finally, AMD talked a little bit about bringing its RDNA 3 GPU architecture to mobile with new GPUs.

There are four new models: the 7600M XT, 7600M, 7700S, and 7600S. The lineup is a little confusing. AMD says the M GPUs are for “high FPS 1080P gaming” and the S GPUs are for “thin & light high framerate gaming.” Apparently what’s really going on here is that the S GPUs are the same as the M GPUs, but are specifically tuned for power or thermally constrained situations.

We aren’t going to be benchmarking these, but based on AMD’s own numbers, it seems like there’s a very slight performance advantage to the 7600M XT over the 7700S.

As a final note, the slides we saw had the 7600M and 7600S listed as having a “1280 bit” memory bus, but that’s definitely just a typo and should read 128 bit. If you see any comments circulating about that, disregard them.