AMD to Announce Ryzen 7000 CPUs on Aug. 29

The event is titled, “Together We Advance_PCs.” Apparently, the underscore at the end is part of an AMD marketing campaign. It’s been used previously to mention advancing _gaming, _supercomputers, _entertainment, and other things, according to Tom’s Hardware. It will feature the aforementioned bigwigs along with other executives to announce the Ryzen 7000 series of processors as well as the all-new AM5 platform. The only other information provided is that it will showcase Zen 4’s adoption of DDR5 and PCIe 5, which had been previously announced. In other words, there’s not much info in the announcement, so you’ll have to tune in for the details. It’ll be live-streamed at 7 PM EST on Aug. 29 on the company’s YouTube channel.

AMD previously discussed its new AM5 platform at Computex and made several performance claims. Among them was a promise of greater than 15 percent single-core uplift, along with boost clocks over 5GHz. At the same event, it demoed an unnamed Zen 4 CPU running at 5.5GHz in gaming. It had also previously stated overclocking would be an important feature for its Ryzen 7000 CPUs. This is a departure from Zen 3, but AMD also said it was raising TDP for some of its CPUs up to 170w from 105W with Zen 3. It was also increasing the maximum TDP to 230W for certain processors, which likely means the Ryzen 9 7900/7950X. It offered a few more details at its financial analyst event in June. It stated Zen 4 will over greater than 35 percent uplift compared with Zen 3, along with more than 25 percent improvement in performance-per-watt.

As we careen toward the launch, fresh info is starting to come fast and furious. A pre-retail version of the Ryzen 7 7700X was recently spotted in the flesh. It’s the first Zen 4 CPU to be photographed with all its labeling intact. Videocardz states it’s an 8-core, 16-thread CPU with a boost clock of 5.4GHz. It’s expected to sell for $299, which was the same price as the Ryzen 7 5700X at launch. This CPU will debut along with three other models at launch, it is rumored. The range of CPUs should include the Ryzen 9 7950X, Ryzen 9 7900X, Ryzen 7 7700X, and Ryzen 5 7600X. They are anticipated to be 16C/32T, 12C/24T, 8C/16T, and 6C/12T parts, as we reported previously.

Though we can (collectively) offer an educated guess on the upcoming CPU specs, pricing remains the big unknown. However, a Canadian retailer recently posted pricing for the four launch CPUs online, according to Tom’s Hardware. Canadian hardware is generally more expensive than that in the US, so it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. However, it can give us an idea of what’s in store. The Flagship 7950X CPU would go for a converted $906, with the 7900X at a more reasonable $625. That’s about the same as its Alder Lake equivalent, the Core i9-12900K right now.

That said, Intel is reportedly about to raise prices on its Alder Lake CPUs. Intel had stated it would begin passing along the inflation it’s experiencing to customers. Whether that price increase gets passed along to Raptor Lake is unknown. The same goes for Zen 4 as well. Raptor Lake is expected to be launching immediately after Zen 4, on Sept. 27. There are also rumors AMD might push its on-sale date to the 27th, just to mess with Intel’s launch plans.

Continue reading

MSI’s Nvidia RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio Review: 2080 Ti Performance, Pascal Pricing

Nvidia's new RTX 3070 is a fabulous GPU at a good price, and the MSI RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio shows it off well.

Core i7-11700K Beats Ryzen 7 5800X in Leaked Geekbench 5 Results

New benchmark results for Rocket Lake show the new CPU family beating AMD's latest Zen 3 CPUs compared core-for-core.

Samsung’s 870 EVO SSDs: SATA Strikes Back

Samsung's new 870 EVO is one of the fastest SSDs around — and if you need a drive in a 4TB flavor, the price isn't too bad, either.

Qualcomm Revamps Snapdragon 865 Again, Calls It Snapdragon 870

Qualcomm just unveiled a new high-end 800-series ARM processor, and I know what you're thinking. Didn't Qualcomm already announce its 2021 flagship system-on-a-chip (SoC)? It did, but the new Snapdragon 870 will slot in below the flagship Snapdragon 888.