AMD's turn to drop the ball?

WITH INTEL'S RAPTOR LAKE CPUs falling over, the company firing around 15,000 employees, and cancelling its 2024 innovation event, AMD must have been enjoying the view - until its new Ryzen 9000 desktop CPUs rolled out. So, is AMD's CPU a minor stumble or game-changing fumble?

- Jeremy Laird

When it comes to CPUs, as opposed to GPUs, AMD just keeps on rolling. The first Ryzenbranded CPUs launched way back in summer 2017. Admittedly, the Ryzen 1000 family and its Zen architecture didn’t immediately put AMD in a leadership position, but it was far more competitive than the chip it replaced.

From there, AMD iterated, improved, and generally delivered. Each new Ryzen generation was an unambiguous step up from its predecessor. Okay, some were more impressive than others, but there were no significant missteps.

That’s impressive, but it arguably comes to an end with the new Ryzen 9000 generation. Certainly, Ryzen 9000’s ‘new’ Zen 5 architecture is disappointing by pretty much every measure. When it comes to IPC or instructions per clock, it’s essentially a single-digit percentage improvement.

Sure, any improvement is welcome, but if this was typically the pace of improvement, imagine how many generations, and more to the point, years, you’d need for the kind of unambiguous upgrade that you can really feel in the real world.