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AMD announces a bunch of new CPUs coming
First up in February is the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, Ryzen 9 7900X3D, and Ryzen 9 7950X3D. As with the 5800X3D, the idea is to stack an extra 64 MB of L3 cache on top of a CPU die. The Ryzen 9 parts have two CPU dies, but only 64 MB of extra L3 cache, so I'm guessing that that means that only one of the dies gets the extra cache. That would explain why the Ryzen 9 parts can have a turbo speed on par with the parts without stacked cache (on the other die), while the one die part has a lower max turbo. If it's an extra 32 MB of L3 cache per die, then I'm really confused about what they're doing.
There's a good chance that the 7800X3D claims the title of fastest gaming CPU, at least for those who care about the difference between 250 and 300 frames per second. Realistically, outside of competitive e-sports, plenty of CPUs are fast enough for just about all practical gaming uses.
Next up in March is the Ryzen Mobile 7000 series laptop APUs. Under AMD's laptop naming scheme, the critical digit is the third one: 2 for Zen 2, 3 for Zen 3, or 4 for Zen 4. If that third digit isn't a 4, then you're getting older CPU cores, which likely isn't the upgrade that you want. As much as I don't like the rebrands, at least a consistent naming scheme allows people who know what the products are to tell what it is. Of course, that probably excludes most of the general public, which is the point.
Even so, while the 7*20, 7*30, and 7*35 parts aren't very interesting, the 7*40 and 7*45 parts are. That last digit of a 0 or 5 makes a huge difference, as they're two totally different product lines. The 7*45 series laptop parts are basically the Ryzen 7000 series desktop parts, but clocked much lower to fit in a laptop. Having the small integrated GPU allows for discrete switchable graphics that previous AMD desktop parts couldn't offer. They're really intended for laptops that have a discrete video card, and will likely be the best way to get high end gaming performance in a laptop.
The 7*40 series parts are more traditional laptop APUs, with up to 8 Zen 4 cores and 12 RDNA3 compute units. Pair that with 7500 MHz LPDDR5X memory and you're presumably looking at 120 GB/sec of memory bandwidth to feed that integrated GPU. Remember that RDNA3 doubles the number of shaders per compute unit, so that's an integrated GPU with 1536 shaders. The most that has ever previously been offered in an integrated GPU for a PC is 768, in the Iris Xe graphics in Intel's higher end Tiger Lake and Alder Lake laptop parts. Rumors have Intel's upcoming Meteor Lake parts matching that GPU size, too.
This would be a definite step up in integrated GPU performance from what has traditionally been offered. The case for getting a discrete GPU, even in a gaming laptop, is getting weaker with every passing year. This will probably still be mostly slower than an Xbox Series S, but that's the nearest comparable that comes to mind. For a laptop with an integrated GPU to be competitive with a current gen game console is a new thing.
The other new CPU announcement from AMD today is the Instinct MI300, which is coming in the latter half of this year. The idea is that you pack some Zen 4 CPU tiles, a bunch of CDNA3 GPU tiles, and 128 GB of HBM3 memory all into a giant package. The downside of HBM3 is that the whole server tops out at 128 GB of memory. The upside is that the CPU and GPU share that memory, giving you essentially unlimited bandwidth to connect them. Bandwidth to connect a CPU and GPU is the bottleneck that prevents a lot of workloads from being done on a GPU, and this eliminates that bottleneck.
This is intended for HPC workloads, not for gaming. Even so, for some workloads, it will be massively superior to anything that you can buy today precisely because the CPU and GPU share a memory pool. For some other GPU-friendly HPC workloads, this will be a terrible product, as if you need more than 128 GB of host memory on a node, you can't get it. Intel has previously announced that they have a similar product coming in 2024.
There's a good chance that the 7800X3D claims the title of fastest gaming CPU, at least for those who care about the difference between 250 and 300 frames per second. Realistically, outside of competitive e-sports, plenty of CPUs are fast enough for just about all practical gaming uses.
Next up in March is the Ryzen Mobile 7000 series laptop APUs. Under AMD's laptop naming scheme, the critical digit is the third one: 2 for Zen 2, 3 for Zen 3, or 4 for Zen 4. If that third digit isn't a 4, then you're getting older CPU cores, which likely isn't the upgrade that you want. As much as I don't like the rebrands, at least a consistent naming scheme allows people who know what the products are to tell what it is. Of course, that probably excludes most of the general public, which is the point.
Even so, while the 7*20, 7*30, and 7*35 parts aren't very interesting, the 7*40 and 7*45 parts are. That last digit of a 0 or 5 makes a huge difference, as they're two totally different product lines. The 7*45 series laptop parts are basically the Ryzen 7000 series desktop parts, but clocked much lower to fit in a laptop. Having the small integrated GPU allows for discrete switchable graphics that previous AMD desktop parts couldn't offer. They're really intended for laptops that have a discrete video card, and will likely be the best way to get high end gaming performance in a laptop.
The 7*40 series parts are more traditional laptop APUs, with up to 8 Zen 4 cores and 12 RDNA3 compute units. Pair that with 7500 MHz LPDDR5X memory and you're presumably looking at 120 GB/sec of memory bandwidth to feed that integrated GPU. Remember that RDNA3 doubles the number of shaders per compute unit, so that's an integrated GPU with 1536 shaders. The most that has ever previously been offered in an integrated GPU for a PC is 768, in the Iris Xe graphics in Intel's higher end Tiger Lake and Alder Lake laptop parts. Rumors have Intel's upcoming Meteor Lake parts matching that GPU size, too.
This would be a definite step up in integrated GPU performance from what has traditionally been offered. The case for getting a discrete GPU, even in a gaming laptop, is getting weaker with every passing year. This will probably still be mostly slower than an Xbox Series S, but that's the nearest comparable that comes to mind. For a laptop with an integrated GPU to be competitive with a current gen game console is a new thing.
The other new CPU announcement from AMD today is the Instinct MI300, which is coming in the latter half of this year. The idea is that you pack some Zen 4 CPU tiles, a bunch of CDNA3 GPU tiles, and 128 GB of HBM3 memory all into a giant package. The downside of HBM3 is that the whole server tops out at 128 GB of memory. The upside is that the CPU and GPU share that memory, giving you essentially unlimited bandwidth to connect them. Bandwidth to connect a CPU and GPU is the bottleneck that prevents a lot of workloads from being done on a GPU, and this eliminates that bottleneck.
This is intended for HPC workloads, not for gaming. Even so, for some workloads, it will be massively superior to anything that you can buy today precisely because the CPU and GPU share a memory pool. For some other GPU-friendly HPC workloads, this will be a terrible product, as if you need more than 128 GB of host memory on a node, you can't get it. Intel has previously announced that they have a similar product coming in 2024.
Comments
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
Yeah I noticed that, just a bit too late
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2024: 47 years on the Net.