AMD confirms Ryzen 7000 CPUs & AM5 Platform Features: 170W Socket Power Limits, 5.5 GHz Stock Clock Speeds

So what we want to clarify is that it’s a 170 Watt socket power which with AMD, that spec is PPT (Package Power) for us. That doesn’t mean that every CPU is going to go up to 170 Watts but it’s 30 (Watt) higher than the socket AM4 power cap which was a 142 (watts). And we did this to mainly improve multi-thread performance as many of the core count chips were actually held back in overall compute performance by relatively modest socket power.

The other point that I want to make is that by raising the minimum required socket power or minimum spec, you also raise the power delivery with every motherboard built to that spec so you get more robust power characteristics on all the boards which we are pretty excited about as well, It should be good for people who want to experiment with overclocking, people who appreciate premium board designs.

Robert Hallock (AMD Director of Technical Marketing)

We used a 280mm (ASETEK) watercooler so nothing exotic it’s just a dual 140 loop that you can buy from Amazon or Newegg. It was running an AMD reference motherboard so one of our internal AM5 socket motherboards, a 16 core prototype part built in late April or early May and we just plugged it in and ran it. It was not an overclocked part, its just the natural frequency of that particular prototype.

So in the game, we were running most of the threads around 5.5 (GHz), it depends on the game load, depends on the scene, of course, clock speed fluctuates up and down so somewhere between 5.2 and 5.5 is pretty common on all the threads playing that game. So I wanna reassure people that this was nothing exotic in terms of cooling and nothing exotic in terms of parts selection or config or overclocking. It is exactly what you see, you plug in a Ryzen 7000 series part and play the game, & that’s the frequency!

Robert Hallock (AMD Director of Technical Marketing)

So L2 cache, we did double it in Zen 4, it is an IPC benefit, it helps the core contain internally more information, overall it improves throughput and so it will be beneficial to multiple categories of workloads, be it integers like gaming or more floating-point like stuff like scientific and creative workloads.

Robert Hallock (AMD Director of Technical Marketing)

We still think of the Ryzen 7000 series as a CPU. The graphics cores in that IO die are not many, the purpose of adding graphics is three-fold. One, it greatly expands these products in the commercial market where they don’t buy discrete at all, they just want to turn it on, have video encode/decode and light up some displays for office work and that’s what the GPU in the IO die will offer so that’s a huge business opportunity for us on the Ryzen PRO side as we start migrating these components over to that business.

The second is for diagnostic purposes, how do you know that you have a bad graphics card? Well, you have to swap in another graphics card but with the graphics core we have, you can do a little bit of troubleshooting thirdly, we were thinking about users who are planning to buy a discrete graphics, and it’s still in transit in the mail but all the other hardware has arrived first so it’s all sat there, looking at a pile of components and don’t have a GPU to actually set that all up. That would go away with the Ryzen 7000 series.

We are still going to do APUs with big graphics so APUs ‘BIG GRAPHICS’, CPUs ‘little graphics’. That would be our strategy going forward.

Robert Hallock (AMD Director of Technical Marketing)

We are developing a lot of technologies that make use of integrated graphics in many ways and there are things that we are able to do with technologies such as Smart Shift ECO where we can turn off the discrete graphics and we can run the notebook off of the iGPU and say you want that because you want less heat, longer battery life (even when you are playing a game) or you want less fan noise or lower power consumption, there’s all these benefits to it. Because we have that thin integrated graphics in Ryzen 7000 series, it’s going to allow us to bring more of these types of smart technologies over to the desktops aswell so those customers can get some of these benefits.

Frank Azor (Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions)

I have seen Smart Access Storage in action and it works pretty well! The primary difference between Direct Storage and Smart Access Storage is that, think of, first of all, Smart Access Storage uses Direct Storage so that’s really important to know. It’s not a replacement for it is something that we built that takes advantage of Direct Storage, it uses the compression algorithms and APIs that Direct Storage promotes, supports, and endorses and asks ISVs to design so it’s fully compatible with them.

What we do a little differently with Smart Access Storage is that because we own an entire platform from an architecture perspective, end to end, from CPU to all the way to storage subsystem to all the way to graphics, that allows us to create more efficient streamlines between the game content and GPU itself. We can avoid some parts of the PC subsystem in order to reduce latency and increase performance to reduce bottlenecks when it comes to decompressing game assets and streaming game assets on the GPU.

Smart Access Storage is more of a ubiquitous solution that has to work across a lot of different combinations of hardware that are out there and those combinations may include mixed configurations, let’s say AMD’s CPU and somebody else’s graphics card. and that’s getting more and more complex, you are gonna have three graphics card partners, you have two CPU partners, that may even get more complex, so because it’s more of a hiding compatible ubiquitous solution, there’s more overhead built in order for it to be compatible so there are more CPU calls than more system memory that it has to do in order for it to work so there’s more decompression and management that is done in the CPU versus in our solution, it’s a direct pipe from NVMe to the GPU with those bottlenecks and overheads removed.

We have designed Smart Access Storage to be as open as possible from a compatibility perspective so that’s why we are using Direct Storage we are going to work with Direct Storage titles and we are going to optimize to work with Direct Storage. We don’t have any intention of developing our own algorithm or API since we don’t want to create a walled garden or another walled garden in the industry, so ideally what we would like to have to happen and this is how we designed Smart Access Storage is that you have a Direct Storage compatible game and you have an all AMD desktop or laptop, we’ll have a foundational infrastructure in place so that so we can avoid those routes that add latency and some of those bottlenecks because of compatibility and we kinda short cut and allow the NVMe to direct send data over to the GPU for decompression. So that’s our architecture and our approach is fully compatible but when we can take a shortcut because we have the end-to-end platform, we are gonna enable that shortcut to be taken.

Frank Azor (Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions)

We have an authorized vendor list of parts that we are developing right now with NVME drives and controllers that are meeting our performance requirements around Smart Access Storage. Just because you have a PCIe Gen 4 or the upcoming Gen 5 drive, it doesn’t mean that those drives are going to be able to keep up with the performance demands and capabilities of Smart Access Storage so something folks should understand is that today a lot of the reason why your NVMe drive isn’t able to fully capitalize on its theoretical performance capability is that there are bottlenecks in the data fabric and those bottlenecks exist in different parts of the PC so that often affects your theoretical versus real performance.

What will happen with Smart Access Storage is that once you remove all those paths from point A to point Z that are your obstacles (bottlenecks), suddenly, your NVMe drive will become the bottleneck because the dGPU can receive the data extremely fast but if your NVMe drive was designed from the get-go counting on these bottlenecks along the data path, then you knew you didn’t put much performance on it because you knew it was going to get wasted. You may have used a slower controller or not used the most premium parts or not optimized your product for the highest theoretical limit that it can reach.

Frank Azor (Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions)