AMD Ryzen 7000 series

A brilliant set of technological advances add to these chips' appeal, but they require a big up-front investment

- PAUL ALCORN

Flip ahead to p48 and you'll see our reviews of the four new Ryzen 7000 series processors that AMD has just released, but before you dive in it's worth taking a broader view. AMD's Zen 3-based Ryzen 5000 processors (the 6000 series are laptop chips) accomplished what was once thought impossible: they unseated Intel's best in every CPU benchmark, including reaching the top of our list of the best gaming CPUs.

But then Intel released its 12th gen Alder Lake chips. Their innovative hybrid x86 architecture, featuring a blend of big Performance cores (P-cores) and little Efficiency cores (E-cores), pushed the company into the lead in all facets of raw performance and even helped reduce its glaring deficiencies in terms of power consumption. But, perhaps most importantly, Alder Lake started a full-on price war, particularly in the mid-range that serves as gamer country.

AMD needed to fight back, and fight back it has. The Ryzen 7000 chips leapfrog Alder Lake for performance, by not only stretching peak frequencies up to 5.7GHz (an 800MHz improvement) but also by offering a 13% improvement in instructions per clock (IPC). The chips also come loaded with new technology, including an integrated Radeon RDNA 2 graphics engine and support for Al instructions based on AVX-512.

Almost immediately, however, Intel gazumped AMD by bringing out its first three of 22 desktop chips based on 13th gen Core architecture, codenamed Raptor Lake. Turn to p52 for an in-depth introduction to Raptor Lake and then to p54 for our verdict on the three new processors.

Zen 4 difference