AMD Ryzen 7 9700X

The new Zen 5 CPUs are here—time to benchmark!

- NICK EVANSON

IT’S BEEN A BUMPY ROAD getting here, what with AMD recalling all stocks of the new Ryzen chips weeks before they were due to be sold, and all about jumping around motherboards, updating firmware, and endlessly fiddling about with settings. But at last, we can bring a review of AMD’s latest and greatest desktop CPU design —and it’s a little underwhelming.

AMD has stuck to the same fundamental floorplan for the new Ryzen 7 9700X as the last-generation 7700X and even the Zen 3-powered 5700X. Underneath the heat spreader, you’ve got two chiplets: one CCD (Core Complex Die), which houses all the processing cores and cache, and one IOD (Input/Output Die) that’s home to a tiny integrated GPU, PCIe and USB hubs, and the RAM controllers.

The 9700X comes with a fully enabled eight-core chiplet and 5.5GHz top Turbo speed. That 8.3 billion transistor CCD sports the latest AMD Zen 5 architecture, of course, with more L1 cache, more internal bandwidth, superior floating point support, a fancier branch prediction unit, and so on. The changes seem pretty comprehensive and AMD claims that Zen 5 has an average IPC (instruction per clock) uplift of 16 percent over Zen 4, though not every application is going to see such an increase.