New Zen 5 CPUs On The Horizon
AMD is busy announcing new chips at the Mobile World Congress, including two new desktop processors called the Ryzen AI 400 and PRO 400 as well as an 84-core EPYC for telecom and edge applications. The Ryzen AI 400 desktop CPUs are similar to their mobile cousins and introduces RDNA 3.5 and XDNA 2 to the desktop. The does mean the weaker Gorgon Point Zen 5c architecture will lead to lower frequencies compared to the Ryzen 9000 series but the RDNA 3.5 GPU will lead to better onboard graphics performance.
The Ryzen PRO 400 will pretty much mirror the Ryzen AI 400 series but will include AMD’s suite of IT management and security technologies, such as AMD Memory Guard and cloud-based recovery. Unless you are really into Copilot and other locally run LLMs, you can pretty much ignore these chips; stick with the Ryzen 9000 series for gaming.
The EPYC 8005-series processors, aka Sorano will also not likely draw your attention. While the 84 core, 225W processor is a beast it is designed for specialized tasks such as virtual radio access network. These chips will feature either six density-optimized Zen 5c chiplets with 14 of 16 cores enabled or 12 of the frequency-optimized Zen 5 variety with one of the eight cores fused off.
It’s not the most exciting of launches but it is good to see AMD ensuring it remains competitive in two lucrative markets.
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