AMD on Monday revealed its Ryzen 7000 series of processors for desktop PCs, promising a 29% speed boost over the Ryzen 5000 line it began selling in 2020. The new models, which go on sale Sept. 27, are good news for gamers, video editors and anyone else who demands top performance.

The 29% speedup shows when running a single, important task. When measuring the performance of multitasking jobs that can span the top-end version of the processor's 16 total processing cores, the performance boost is 49%, Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster said in an exclusive interview. If you're happy with the same performance as a last-generation Ryzen 5000, the Ryzen 7000 line matches it while using 62% less power, he said.

The most expensive model, the Ryzen 9 7950X, costs $699 — $100 cheaper than the Ryzen 9 5950X at its 2020 launch during the earlier days of the pandemic. AMD also offers $549 7900X, $399 7700X and $299 7600X models that run at slower clock speeds and don't have as many of the new Zen 4 processing cores. AMD also will continue selling its 2-year-old 5000 products in lower priced machines.

For anyone in the market for a high-end machine, it's good news. AMD has been carving away sales from Intel, and the new models will keep the pressure on its rival. And it could reduce the temptations some Windows PC users might feel to switch to Macs with Apple's efficient M1 and M2 processors.

"AMD is giving the gaming and content creation crowd exactly what it's asking for — better performance or lower power at the same price," said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

Some of the credit for the speed boost goes to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which builds the AMD designs on a newer 5nm line that's faster and more efficient with electrical power, helping to push the top clock speed of the chip up 800MHz to a peak of 5.7GHz, Papermaster said. Also deserving is the Zen 4 technology, which churns through 13% more programming instructions for each tick of the chip's click than Zen 3. 

New chip packaging techniques

More broadly, though, AMD has benefited from the "chiplet" approach it began with the first-generation Zen design in 2017, packaging multiple smaller processing elements into a single, larger processor.

Such chip packaging technology is moving to the forefront of processor innovation, as evidenced by Apple's M1 Ultra, which joins two M1 Max chips into a single larger processor, and Intel's 2023 Meteor Lake processor, which includes four separate processing tiles, three built by TSMC.

The Ryzen 9 5950X includes two chiplets, each with eight Zen 4 cores, and one chiplet for input-output tasks like communicating with memory. AMD will marry more of these eight-core chiplets for server processors it'll sell to data center customers later this year.

"With a desktop, you're going from eight cores to 16 cores," Papermaster said. "Think of a server going all the way up through 64 cores and many more than that in the server we're going to announce this fall."

Mobile versions of Zen 4-based processors are scheduled to arrive in laptops in 2023. AMD also plans a compact Zen 4C variation for cloud computing work in data centers that'll offer up to 128 processing cores in the first quarter of 2023. It sacrifices some clock speed for the ability to run lots of independent jobs in parallel.

Zen 4 based machines also benefit from other speed boosts:

• Faster interfaces to the rest of the computer, supporting DDR5 memory and PCI Express 5.0 links to devices like storage and graphics cards
• The new AM5 socket to plug into circuit boards, which the company will support through at least 2025 to ease upgrades for PC makers and customers 
• The ability to process AVX-512 instructions, which should speed up some software like image editors that employ artificial intelligence methods

A third dimension in chiplet packaging

AMD relies chiefly on a relatively straightforward side-by-side packaging approach for its mainstream chips. But it's added a more sophisticated third dimension to its packaging options, stacking high-speed cache memory on top of the processing cores. It began this approach, called 3D V-Cache, with a rarified top-end option for the earlier Zen 3 processors. 3D V-Cache models are on the way for the Zen 4 generation, too, though Papermaster wouldn't say when they'll arrive.

Packaging flexibility has been crucial to AMD. For example, TSMC builds the Zen 4 processing chiplets on its latest 5nm manufacturing process but uses the cheaper, older 6nm process for the chiplet handling input-output functions.

The approach means AMD can spend money more judiciously, since the using the newest process raises the cost of a chip's basic circuitry element, the transistor.

"The cost per transistor is going up, and it's going to continue to go up in every generation," Papermaster said. "That's why chiplets have been so important."

AMD will also use chiplets built with TSMC's 5nm technology for its next generation RDNA3 graphics, the foundation of its upcoming Radeon graphics processors, CEO Lisa Su said during AMD's Ryzen 7000 launch event Monday. Showing off a prototype, she said RDNA3 offers 50% better power efficiency, an important consideration for gamers trying to run software without overheating their PCs. The Ryzen 7000 processors have more basic RDNA2 graphics built in, useful for booting up machines and other basic tasks but expected to be supplemented by more powerful, separate graphics chips.

Don't count Intel out

AMD has succeeded in part through its chiplet strategy, but it's also benefited from Intel's major difficulties advancing its manufacturing over the better part of a decade. That advantage might not last much longer.

Intel expects its own manufacturing technology to match rivals by 2024 and surpass them by 2025, in the view of Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger. And it's been working for years on its own packaging technologies. Where AMD's 3D V-Cache is a pricey rarity, Intel will stack chip elements in its mainstream 2023 Meteor Lake PC processor using a technology called Foveros.

"Intel has more diverse and technically advanced options" when it comes to chiplet packaging, Tirias Research analyst Kevin Krewell said.

Another Intel advantage is the combination of performance cores and efficiency cores, an approach cribbed from the smartphone market that better balances speed and battery life. That's in Intel's current processor, Alder Lake.

Intel declined to comment.

Could Intel build AMD chips?

If Intel succeeds in its current ambitions, it could one day be building AMD chiplets. That's because Gelsinger launched a new foundry business which, like TSMC and Samsung, builds chips for others.

AMD once built its own processors but spun that off as the business now called GlobalFoundries. Papermaster wouldn't comment directly on what it would take to sign on with Intel Foundry Services but said it requires trustworthy foundry partners with proven capability and a good working partnership.

"We would love to see more diversity in the foundry ecosystem," Papermaster said.