AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs are going to be announced soon and the new chips are made with the 5nm process. This means that while the size of the die is getting smaller the number of transistors is still increasing. Each 8-core 5nm Zen 4 CCD is made up of 6.57 Billion transistors compared to 4.15B of the previous 7nm Zen 3 CCD. With that said, a recent preview noted that the AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs are going to be limited by temperature and not by clocks or power.
AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs Limited By Temperature
The preview by angstronomics mentioned that cooling is going to be a challenge when it comes to the new AMD Ryzen 7000 series CPUs. The die can go up to 2 Watts/mm² with proper cooling. The heatspreader covers a smaller area as you might have seen when we showed leaked images of the AMD Ryzen 7700X. The smaller area covered makes things worse.
Sky Juice from angstronomics deduced the following:
Due to the cooling difficulty and higher power limits on Ryzen 7000 Dekstop, the philosophy has changed to follow a more laptop-like approach. Instead of fixing a clock speed or power limit, the processor is now temperature limited. This means maximizing performance for a given cooling capability. The processor will adjust to stay within the temperature limits. This also means a more significant performance difference that changes with cooling ability.
From what we have seen AMD Ryzen 7000 series might have a tough time complete with Intel 13th generation Raptor Lake. While I love to support the underdog, which AMD really isn’t anymore but the premium of switching to the new AM5 platform and the additional cost of upgrading to DDR5 RAM are going to play a major role. We got a few listings for the upcoming Ryzen 7000 series and the CPUs are not going to be cheap.
- AMD Ryzen 9 7950X – $1158 (906 USD)
- AMD Ryzen 9 7900X – $798 (624 USD)
- AMD Ryzen 7 7700X – $631 (493 USD)
- AMD Ryzen 5 7600X – $435 (340 USD)
Intel Raptor Lake on the other hand seems to have better pricing if these retail listings are to be trusted.
- i9-13900K – $940.99 Canadian (735 USD)
- i9-13900KF – $900.99 Canadian (694 USD)
- i7-13700KF – $625.99 Canadian (482 USD)
- i7-13700K – $662.99 Canadian (511 USD)
- i5-13600K – $460.99 Canadian (355 USD)
- i5-13600KF – $423.99 Canadian (326 USD)
Factor in the price of DDR5 memory and a new AM5 motherboard and you could be looking at a very expensive upgrade.
- ROG Crosshair X670E Extreme – 1475 Euros (1500 USD)
- ROG Crosshair X670E HERO – 1088 Euros (1106 USD)
- ROG Crosshair X670E GENE – 977 Euros (994 USD)
- ROG STRIX X670E-E Gaming WiFi – 912 Euros (927 USD)
- ROG STRIX X670E-F Gaming WiFi – 809 Euros (823 USD)
- ROG STRIX X670E-A Gaming WiFi – 783 Euros (796 USD)
- PROART X670E-Creator WiFi – 894 Euros (909 USD)
- PRIME X670-P WiFi – 510 Euros (518 USD)
- PRIME X670-P – 483 Euros (491 USD)
It is worth mentioning that DDR5 should get cheaper and that AMD is working on B650E motherboards that will support PCIe Gen5 for the storage and graphics card. This should make upgrading a bit affordable. The upcoming few months are going to be very interesting and I for one would like to see how well these upcoming AMD Ryzen chips can be cooled and how well they perform against the competition.
Let us know what you think about this deduction and whether you think AMD Ryzen 7000 Series is going to be limited by temperature.
Source: angstronomics
