AMD has recently revealed exciting enhancements for some of its top processors. The company introduced several upgrades to the Ryzen 9000 series, which include a significant increase in thermal design power (TDP) for select CPUs and improvements in core-to-core latency that have been anticipated by many. Additionally, AMD has expanded support for faster DDR5 RAM, among other announcements made today.
The latest BIOS iteration, dubbed AGESA PI 1.2.0.2, introduces various updates, but the most noteworthy change is the elevation of the TDP for two of its processors.
Previously, both the Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X were fixed at a TDP of 65 watts, a limitation that some users found restrictive compared to the 120-watt TDP of the Ryzen 9 9900X and the especially high 170-watt Ryzen 9 9950X. AMD justified this design by stating that it aimed for these lower-tier CPUs to provide efficient performance. However, to appeal more to enthusiasts, the company has now bumped the TDP of the 9700X and 9600X to 105 watts.
Increasing the TDP by over 60% via a firmware update might seem risky, but AMD assures users that these CPUs have been validated at the 105W level. Furthermore, this TDP increase is officially covered by the warranty, allowing you to unlock it without the fear of voiding your warranty. That said, a more robust CPU cooler will be necessary to manage the additional heat generated.
AMD has not clarified how the increased TDP might impact clock speeds or overall performance, leading to a likely need for reviewers to conduct new tests on these CPUs. Nevertheless, considering the modest generational improvements from Zen 4 to Zen 5, this adjustment in TDP appears to be a promising development.
Additionally, there’s the previously mentioned enhancement in core-to-core latency. Both users and reviewers had pointed out that the inter-core latency on the Ryzen 9000 series was about 50% greater than that of the Ryzen 7000 line. Those who updated their firmware last week have reported that AMD has rectified this issue, successfully lowering latency by 50% on the Zen 5 architecture.
On the hardware side, AMD has now enabled EXPO support for DDR5-8000 memory. This level of RAM is among the highest available and is typically unnecessary for most gamers. AMD claims that upgrading from DDR5-6000 to DDR5-8000 can reduce latency by approximately 1 to 2 nanoseconds.
AMD also introduced the new X870 and X870E motherboards that maximize the capabilities of the AM5 socket. These motherboards support the full-speed capabilities of PCIe Gen 5.0 for both graphics and storage, arriving just in time for the anticipated RTX 50 series, which is expected to utilize this technology.
Benchmarks for the new Ryzen 9000 CPUs generally indicate they excel in productivity workloads but exhibit limited increases in gaming performance. Additionally, it has come to light that these CPUs have been operating about 10% slower than expected. Fortunately, this should be rectified by forthcoming mandatory Windows updates that will enhance branch prediction optimizations. Once everything is accounted for, we’ll be better positioned to evaluate whether these updates significantly enhance CPU performance.
