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AMD has confirmed the price and release date details for the Ryzen 9000 desktop CPU lineup, and it will undercut what you paid for the 7000 series.
The headlining processor, the 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X, will go on sale August 15th at $649, or $50 below the initial price of the Ryzen 9 7950X. The slightly more affordable 12-core Ryzen 9 9900X will sell the same day for $499.
Mid-range buyers won’t have to wait so long. The six-core Ryzen 5 9600X debuts August 8th for $279, and the eight-core Ryzen 7 9700X will ship at the same time for $359. As a whole, the new lineup is priced at least $20 less than its 7000 equivalents.
AMD Ryzen 9000 Series processors are ready to deliver world class gaming and creator performance.
Available Aug 8:
• Ryzen 7 9700X
• Ryzen 5 9600XAvailable Aug 15:
• Ryzen 9 9950X
• Ryzen 9 9900X pic.twitter.com/L9YOAyKmHg— AMD Ryzen (@AMDRyzen) August 6, 2024
The Ryzen 9000 promises a serious upset of the desktop chip space as its release date approaches. All models are based on AMD’s new Zen 5 architecture, which promises better throughput and parallel processing. The net result is a claimed 16% typical jump for instructions per clock compared to Zen 4.
There’s also new X870 and X870E mainboard chipsets that make PCIe 5.0 and USB 4 standard, although boards based on them won’t be available on launch. Existing AM5 boards will be fine, however.
The 9000 series release date news comes soon after the first Ryzen AI 300-based laptops arrived to mostly critical acclaim. It also comes at a bad time for Intel. The company is still grappling with 13th- and 14th-gen Core CPU instability headaches, and it recently cut thousands of jobs as it ceded ground to AMD and Nvidia.
Intel is prepping answers to AMD, including its “Lunar Lake” laptop chips. However, the desktop counterpart (“Arrow Lake”) will come later. This effectively gives AMD a chance to go uncontested for months in the desktop space, and might cost Intel significant market share.
