The current period is not conductive to semiconductor manufacturers.
Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve (Fed), said on August 26 that the central bank would continue to increase its rates aggressively to fight against inflation.
The problem is that economists believe that this monetary tightening is likely to cause a hard landing in the economy, in other words a recession. And who says recession says that households will arbitrate in their spending and sacrifice purchases relating to technological products, video games and other non-essential purchases. Companies on their side would suspend their investment projects.
This scenario is particularly bad for chipmakers whose products power a huge number of industries ranging from video games and cryptocurrencies to automotive, IT and data centers. Moreover, there has been a slowdown in PC sales, while ongoing changes in the crypto industry suggest that the need for chips will be less. In the video game industry, there is a kind of saturation revealed recently Nvidia (NVDA), the rival of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) (AMD), which admitted to having manufactured too many chips than what the industry needed.
Better Performance
Despite these headwinds AMD continues to forge ahead. The company has just revealed a new range of processors whose objective is clearly to impose itself among PC manufacturers and video game fans.
This range of processors is aimed specifically at desktop PCs: these are the Ryzen 7000. Based on the Zen 4 architecture, these chips, which were eagerly awaited, promise a significant good in terms of performance compared to the previous generation. These new chips kick off the manufacturer's next-generation AM5 machines.
The AMD Zen 4 architecture replaces the AMD Zen 3 architecture, used on the Ryzen 5000 and Ryzen 6000, is based on four major new features for AMD.
First, the switch to a 5nm TSMC manufacturing process, eagerly awaited for its gains in performance and consumption. Then comes the integration of AVX-512 instructions allowing AMD Zen 4 processors to be more gifted with artificial intelligence (AI) inference calculations. Finally, there are several architectural changes.
All this allows AMD to make impressive performance gains, especially in video games. Compared to the previous generation, AMD promises up to 40% performance gain in games like Rainbow Six Siege and F1 2021 (+36%). The gain is more limited, but still noticeable, on high performance games like CS Go (+5%). There's an average 35% performance increase on Shadow of the Tome Raider, 6% on Borderlands 3 and 13% on CS:GO etc.
Nonetheless, the chip is on par with Intel's (INTC) on Cyberpunk 2077 and does 3% worse on GTA V.
'Ultimate PC Experience for Gamers and Creators Alike'
“The AMD Ryzen 7000 Series brings leadership gaming performance, extraordinary power for content creation, and advanced scalability,” said Saeid Moshkelani, senior vice president and general manager, Client business unit, AMD, in a press release. “With the next generation Ryzen 7000 Series desktop processors, we are proud to uphold our promise of leadership and continuous innovation, delivering the ultimate PC experience for gamers and creators alike.”
According to AMD, its all-new Zen 4 microarchitecture delivers a 13% increase in instructions per clock (IPC) and about a 30% increase in base clock speeds, which increase by about 1 GHz over the entire range. Thanks to these performance gains, the company claims that the new Ryzen 9 7950X, which sits at the top of the range, offers better content creation performance than an Intel Core i9-12900K, Intel's best processor.
Most impressively, it does so with a 47% higher output per watt, which translates to much better power efficiency. Additionally, the Ryzen 7970X offers 11% faster single-core performance and more than 44% faster multi-core performance compared to its 12th Gen Intel Alder Lake rival.
AMD also claims that Ryzen 7000 processors are approximately 29% faster than Ryzen 5000 models for single-core tasks, and the performance boost reaches 49% when all 16 cores of Ryzen 9 chips are used.
The first four high-end Ryzen 7000 CPUs will be available on September 27, starting at $299. The first deliveries for lower-end chips for mainstream and budget computers is scheduled for 2023.
