Ryzen 7000: Everything We Know About AMD's New Generation of CPU

AMD has been on quite the journey over the last five years with their Ryzen line. Now, Team Red is set to launch the 7000 series in 2022. Promising significant performance improvements, new features via Zen 4 micro architecture, and the AM5 platform for motherboards. It has all the potential on paper to be one of the best gaming CPUs available. Let’s dive into everything we know about the AMD Ryzen 7000 to see why that’s possible.

Ryzen 7000 Series Features and Highlights

We may not have the end products to pull concrete specifications from, but AMD have given us a view of what we can expect overall from the Ryzen 7000 Series. First, the chips will top out at 16 cores and 32 threads. AMD even demonstrated the core clock going up to 5.5GHz while playing Ghostwire: Tokyo. For perspective, the Ryzen 5950X peaked at 4.9GHz. That’s even more impressive when you realise they did that without overclocking and using a standard 280mm AIO cooler.

These improved speeds are thanks to the all-new Zen 4 architecture. This new design has facilitated the increase in clock frequency by moving from a 7nm process node to a 5nm node. When compared to Zen 3, it also brings a greater than 15% boost in single-threaded performance, double L2 cache, and expanded instruction with AI acceleration.

What About the AM5 Socket?

One of the biggest changes coming alongside the 7000 series is in the AM5 socket. Moving away from the PGA (Pin Grid Array) sockets of the AM4, AMD is now making use of LGA (Land Grid Array). These use contact surfaces rather than comparatively vulnerable pins. Despite the change, coolers designed for the old socket will still work with AM5. Provided, that is, they can cope with the thermal power requirements of the new CPUs.

To go with the new CPUs, there will be new chipsets. Three are known so far – the A620, the mid-range B560, and the high-end X670. Being manufactured with chiplets, each one of these will bring four SATA lanes, up to 14 USB ports, and eight PCIe Gen4 lanes. With the X670 chipset, two chiplets are installed which doubles the connections.

Time for a RAM Upgrade

Another change coming is the upgrade from DDR4 to DDR5. With AMD Ryzen 7000 though, it seems that change is a lot more hardline. The new CPUs and chipsets will not have any support for DDR4 RAM. That means you will only be able to use DDR5 RAM if you are planning on upgrading your CPU. You may need to upgrade a few other things at the same time.

The AMD Ryzen 7000 Series at a Glance

Taking a step back, here’s all the key information we have on these CPUs in a nice, bite-size form.

Based on the Zen 4 core architecture, will have up to 16 cores and 32 threads
Uses chiplets manufactured in the 5nm and 6nm process
Boost clocks of up to >5.5GHz
AM5 socket will use LGA
PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 are supported, no support for DDR4
Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 170 watts
L2 cache doubled from 512KB to 1MB
AM4 coolers compatible with AM5 socket

What Happened to the 6000 Series?

You might have picked up on this, but the last generation of AMD CPUs was the 5000 series. So why have we skipped straight to 7000? Well, we haven’t technically. The Ryzen 6000 series does exist, but these are mobile CPUs exclusively. It will be interesting to see if AMD continues this trend with future lines or if this is just a one-off.

When is the Ryzen 7000 Series Releasing?

No fixed date has been given by AMD, but they have indicated some potential windows. At their CES keynote in January 2022, the company gave a rough release of the second half of the year. Then, at Computex 2022, AMD claimed the Ryzen 7000 was scheduled for Q3 of this year. As we have just entered that time period, we could see the new processors shipping in the next three months. Keep in mind that it is not finalised at the time of writing.

Get Yourself Ryzen 7000 Ready

While we wait to find out what CPUs we will get at launch, here are some things to have on your shopping list for when Ryzen 7000 launches. If you just cannot wait until then and simply must have the latest tech, we here at Overclockers UK sell a range of Ryzen 5000 series gaming PCs to tide you over.