AMD Ryzen 7950X

Dave James pens these words and takes complete blame for saying: Zen 4 and the art of CPU maintenance.

- Dave James

The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X is the vanguard for a whole new generation of CPUs from AMD. At its most basic level, this is a straight 16-core, 32-thread CPU, packing a pair of eight-core compute chiplets together with an I/O die to get all the data into and out of the processor package.

Zen 4 is a derivative architecture built from Zen 3 with fundamental differences: it's built on a new 5nm process node from its long-time TSMC foundry partner, while the I/O die (IOD) has shifted to a 6nm node; AMD has made the move to a DDR5 memory controller, and it's also popped PCIe 5.0 support in there, too. For the first time outside of its APU range, AMD is also packing integrated graphics into its chips, into the IOD that offers AV1 hardware support and hybrid graphics. You will want a recent Kernel 5.18+, Mesa 22.2+ with the latest firmware to get this working.

Architecturally, Zen 4 is a similar layout to Zen 3 but with 'more' for the critical areas that keep execution units fed - it has double the L1 cache to reduce latency, enhanced branch prediction, larger op cache, retire queue, register file, buffers throughout and enhanced load/store for a 60% increase in IPC.

Getting up to speed

It is certainly fast. We did a bit of a double take checking out the numbers when the single-thread run tipped the odd core up to 5.9GHz. Even stable at 5.8GHz was pretty shocking. It's not quite that high under an all-core load, but 5.4GHz across all 16 cores still makes it one blazing chip.