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AMD announces new CPU bins to fill out their lineup
When Intel filled out their Alder Lake lineup in January, I commented that Intel now pretty much owned the market for $200 and under CPUs. It's not that they were better than the AMD competition, but rather, that there wasn't any AMD competition. AMD is now changing that, sort of.
Most of today's launches are just lower bins of old chips. The Ryzen 7 5700X is basically a Ryzen 7 5800X (eight cores) that is clocked a little lower and has a lower TDP. It was previously released as the OEM-only Ryzen 7 5800, but is now available to purchase separately with an MSRP of $300. This gives AMD another way to sell fully functional Zen 3 chiplets that couldn't quite meet 5800X specs.
The Ryzen 5 5600 is basically a Ryzen 5 5600X (six cores) clocked a little lower and has an MSRP of $200. For comparison, you can now get the 5600X for $230, as compared to its original MSRP of $300.
The Ryzen 5 5500 is still six cores, but clocked lower yet and with less cache. This may just be a way for AMD to get rid of APUs where the integrated GPU doesn't work. That's a non-starter in laptops, so even if the chip is mostly for laptops (though there is also the Ryzen 5 5600G), you can sell it as a desktop part with the GPU disabled. It has an MSRP of $160.
The rest of the parts use Zen 2 cores, not Zen 3. The Ryzen 5 4600G has six cores and an integrated GPU with an MSRP of $154. The Ryzen 5 4500 loses the integrated GPU and clocks a little lower for $130. The Ryzen 3 4100 gets you only four cores for $100.
It remains to be seen how high of volume parts these will be. In particular, the Zen 2 parts are likely to be just a way for AMD to clear some old inventory, especially partially defective dies that couldn't fit any previous bin. There's no need to keep manufacturing a bunch more Zen 2 chiplets when far better Zen 3 chiplets are about the same die size on the same process node.
For comparison, AMD previously had the Ryzen 3 3100, a quad core part with an attractive MSRP, but it was such a low volume part (with four cores disabled out of eight) that retailers generally charged far above the MSRP for it. Even today, it costs $188 on New Egg.
If AMD has sufficient volume (and reduced demand, due to improved competition from Intel), they could ship the new parts in very high volumes, simply by partially crippling chips that could have met a higher bin. I don't think it makes much sense to keep building Zen 2 parts for the sake of having something cheaper, but cutting down Zen 3 parts could. You don't do that if you're heavily capacity constrained, as if you'll sell all the parts you make, you want to sell every part as the highest bin that you can. But if trying to sell all of your parts as the top bin means that only half of them sell, then you might as well sell half as the top bin and also the other half as cheaper, lower bins.
The new part that AMD wants to headline is the awkwardly named Ryzen 7 5800X3D. It is basically a lower clocked Ryzen 7 5800X, but with an enormous 96 MB of L3 cache rather than 32 MB. All that extra cache costs money, so the part will have an MSRP of $450, as compared to the current $350 price tag on the normal 5800X.
AMD claims that this is the fastest gaming part ever. I'm skeptical of that, though it probably will win at some games. At minimum, it will be the fastest CPU for anything that relies heavily on tons of L3 cache. But there are diminishing returns to adding more cache, and 32 MB of L3 is already a lot.
It remains to be seen if this will be a high volume part, or if it's AMD's answer to Intel's old Core i7-5775C, and more of a tech demo than something that they expect a lot of people to buy. Regardless, it should be available on April 20.
And yes, I realize that AMD wants most of their official MSRPs to end in a 9. I ignored that and rounded up.
Most of today's launches are just lower bins of old chips. The Ryzen 7 5700X is basically a Ryzen 7 5800X (eight cores) that is clocked a little lower and has a lower TDP. It was previously released as the OEM-only Ryzen 7 5800, but is now available to purchase separately with an MSRP of $300. This gives AMD another way to sell fully functional Zen 3 chiplets that couldn't quite meet 5800X specs.
The Ryzen 5 5600 is basically a Ryzen 5 5600X (six cores) clocked a little lower and has an MSRP of $200. For comparison, you can now get the 5600X for $230, as compared to its original MSRP of $300.
The Ryzen 5 5500 is still six cores, but clocked lower yet and with less cache. This may just be a way for AMD to get rid of APUs where the integrated GPU doesn't work. That's a non-starter in laptops, so even if the chip is mostly for laptops (though there is also the Ryzen 5 5600G), you can sell it as a desktop part with the GPU disabled. It has an MSRP of $160.
The rest of the parts use Zen 2 cores, not Zen 3. The Ryzen 5 4600G has six cores and an integrated GPU with an MSRP of $154. The Ryzen 5 4500 loses the integrated GPU and clocks a little lower for $130. The Ryzen 3 4100 gets you only four cores for $100.
It remains to be seen how high of volume parts these will be. In particular, the Zen 2 parts are likely to be just a way for AMD to clear some old inventory, especially partially defective dies that couldn't fit any previous bin. There's no need to keep manufacturing a bunch more Zen 2 chiplets when far better Zen 3 chiplets are about the same die size on the same process node.
For comparison, AMD previously had the Ryzen 3 3100, a quad core part with an attractive MSRP, but it was such a low volume part (with four cores disabled out of eight) that retailers generally charged far above the MSRP for it. Even today, it costs $188 on New Egg.
If AMD has sufficient volume (and reduced demand, due to improved competition from Intel), they could ship the new parts in very high volumes, simply by partially crippling chips that could have met a higher bin. I don't think it makes much sense to keep building Zen 2 parts for the sake of having something cheaper, but cutting down Zen 3 parts could. You don't do that if you're heavily capacity constrained, as if you'll sell all the parts you make, you want to sell every part as the highest bin that you can. But if trying to sell all of your parts as the top bin means that only half of them sell, then you might as well sell half as the top bin and also the other half as cheaper, lower bins.
The new part that AMD wants to headline is the awkwardly named Ryzen 7 5800X3D. It is basically a lower clocked Ryzen 7 5800X, but with an enormous 96 MB of L3 cache rather than 32 MB. All that extra cache costs money, so the part will have an MSRP of $450, as compared to the current $350 price tag on the normal 5800X.
AMD claims that this is the fastest gaming part ever. I'm skeptical of that, though it probably will win at some games. At minimum, it will be the fastest CPU for anything that relies heavily on tons of L3 cache. But there are diminishing returns to adding more cache, and 32 MB of L3 is already a lot.
It remains to be seen if this will be a high volume part, or if it's AMD's answer to Intel's old Core i7-5775C, and more of a tech demo than something that they expect a lot of people to buy. Regardless, it should be available on April 20.
And yes, I realize that AMD wants most of their official MSRPs to end in a 9. I ignored that and rounded up.
![[Deleted User]](http://w8.vanillicon.com/v2/8187bdfebcad0c6fe557549abc3ef848.svg)
Comments
So AMD is returning to fill out the lower spectrum of their product lineup.
The question, I think, is why are we seeing this now? Is this just natural demand lowering after a product release? Is this fab capacity / allocation / yield improving (I doubt this one). Is this Intel eating into AMD's sales sufficient enough for them to come back to this?
On the surface, it's an odd time to be announcing a big addition to your product lineup when you have a new generation, on a new socket, due to come out in just a few months. But... This will be the last hurrah for AM4, so if anyone is wanting a drop-in upgrade for an existing system, these new chips look very attractive as you don't need to purchase an entire new computer - so in that vein I think it's pretty smart, even if we are on the cusp of Zen4 coming out.
As an aside, I remember a few months ago, before Alder Lake release, a lot of folks were super excited about the 5800X3D and AMD was hyping it pretty heavily. Then Alder Lake came out and crushed the benchmarks, and we didn't really hear anything else about it. So I would temper my expectations of what the 5800X3D brings to the table: it will probably beat out everything AMD has released to date in gaming, but I am expecting it, at best, to trade blows with an Alder Lake, and probably only in very specific situations. Alder Lake has been a surprising return to form for Intel - on par with the release of Core, but I think AMD is in a much better situation to respond and compete than it has been in the recent past.
However, while the parts are nominally launched, you can't buy them. At least for now, AMD is only selling them to Lenovo, a Chinese company that builds workstations. So in order to get one of the new CPUs, you'll have to buy a completed workstation from a Chinese company and hope that it doesn't come with spyware preinstalled for you like their laptops did several years ago. Also, AMD won't tell you the prices on the CPUs.
It's possible that the chips will have a more public launch rather than the Lenovo-only launch later on. But for now, if you want to launch some terrific CPUs but make sure that no one buys them, then that's how to do it. Perhaps AMD will just have to use their Zen 3 chiplets on the new bins announced yesterday instead.