AMD Introduces Its Most Powerful Zen 5 CPU Ryzen 9 9950X

AMD has announced the launch of its first Zen 5 desktop processors, with Ryzen 9 9950X being the flagship product. The company claims it is “the world’s most powerful desktop consumer processor.” Based on the company’s existing AM5 platform, the new Ryzen 9000 series of CPUs comprises the Ryzen 9 9950X, Ryzen 9 9900X, Ryzen 7 9700X, and Ryzen 5 9600X.

The flagship Ryzen 9 9950X comes with a 16-core, 32-thread CPU, with 80MB of L2+L3 cache and a 5.7GHz boost clock. The company says users can expect around a 16 percent instructions per cycle (IPC) uplift in performance over the previous gen Ryzen CPUs and promises big gains in the gaming department as well.

“It’s a big leap, and we’re very very proud of it,” says Donny Woligroski, senior technical marketing manager for consumer processors at AMD, in a press briefing with The Verge. “It’s a monster. This processor does well against the competition.”

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AMD Ryzen 9 9950X Promises Huge Gains Over Precursors

AMD claims its new flagship, the Ryzen 9 9950X, will offer gains of up to 56% in Blender when pitted against Intel’s Core i9-14900K. It even showed 21% gains in Cinebench 2024. Speaking of gaming, AMD’s benchmarks suggest a 4% frame rate boost over Intel’s offering in games like Borderlands 3, all the way up to 23 percent better performance in Horizon Zero Dawn.

AMD’s latest flagship CPU has the new Zen 5 architecture at its heart. It still leverages the AM5 socket, with the PCle Gen 5 and DDR5 support, but there are some enhancements under the hood to offer better performance that the company claims make this not a trivial update.

“Sometimes there are updates of Zen that are not as fundamental, but Zen 5 is a sweeping update with vastly improved branch prediction for both accuracy and latency,” says Woligroski. “It’s a really impressive difference, and this delivers up to twice the instruction bandwidth, up to twice the data bandwidth, and up to twice the AI performance of the last gen.”

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AMD’s Commitment To AM4 And AM5 Is Paying Off

AMD originally promised that the AM5 socket, which came out in 2012, would keep getting new processor support until 2025, but it’s now extending that promise at Computex beyond 2027.

The previous AM4 socket was launched in 2-16, and it still seems impressive, even after 10 years. The company even announced the new 5900XT and 5800XT processors for AM4 motherboards in July. The original 5900X was a 12-core processor, but the 5900XT is now a 16-core, 32-thread cores, 16 threads, and a boost clock up to 4.8GHz.

The company’s commitment to AM4 and now AM5 seems to be paying off, especially when compared to Intel, which seems set to unveil its fourth desktop socket since 2016.