We had a chance to catch up with AMD's Senior Technical Marketing Manager of Consumer Processors, Donny Woligroski, during Computex 2024 to discuss the latest news surrounding the company's Zen 5 Ryzen 9000 announcements at the show. Woligroski told us that while the Ryzen 9000 chips won't beat the company's existing specialized Ryzen 7000X3D chips in gaming — they're currently among the best CPUs for gaming — the difference between the chips will be closer than we've seen in the past. AMD is also working on an improved version of its 3D V-Cache tech, and Woligroski explained why the new Ryzen 9000 chips mark a big step forward even though they have the same core counts and largely the same boost frequencies as their predecessors.
In its press release, AMD billed the flagship Ryzen 9950X as the "fastest consumer desktop performance in the world," but notably didn't claim it's the fastest gaming chip on the market despite its benchmarks showing the 9950X beating Intel's flagship Core i9-14900K by ~11% on average in gaming. However, the company didn't compare it with its own Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which leads our CPU benchmark hierarchy in gaming performance.
I asked Woligroski if the 9950X would take the crown of the fastest gaming chip on the market. "Is it the fastest in gaming? It's faster than the competition in our tests. X3D is still the king of the hill, but by a much smaller margin than typically between X3D and non-X3D," Woligroski responded. "So a 7800X3D would, yes, be faster than 9700X, but maybe not by as much as you would expect."
This isn't the first time we've seen AMD's specialized, ultra-powerful X3D gaming chips retain their lead over a newer generation of AMD's chips: In our testing, despite having the newer Zen 4 architecture, the fastest Ryzen 7000 chip, the Ryzen 9 7950X, trailed the previous-gen Zen 3 Ryzen 7 5800X3D by about 8%. AMD didn't beat its own watermark until the new Ryzen 7 7800X3D launched a year later.
Woligroski points to a slimmer margin between the X3D and non-X3D chips this time around, an improvement likely borne of Zen 5's impressive 16% IPC gain, faster L1 and L2 caches, and better boost frequencies. We'll also see much faster performance in productivity workloads with Ryzen 9000 over the X3D chips.
The Ryzen 7 7800X3D's second-gen 3D V-Cache took gaming performance to a whole new level — it's ~30% faster in gaming than the fastest standard Ryzen 7000 processor. We'll have to wait for our own testing to see how that pans out with newer models, but AMD clearly has plans for its new 3D V-Cache engine that powers the X3D chips.
