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The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X Review: Flagship Zen 5 Soars - and Stalls


by Gavin Bonshor on August 14, 2024 9:00 AM EST - Posted in - CPUs - AMD - Desktop - Zen 5 - AM5 - Ryzen 9000 - Ryzen 9 9950X - Ryzen 9 9900X Earlier this month, AMD launched the first two desktop CPUs using their latest Zen 5 microarchitecture: the Ryzen 7 9700X and the Ryzen 5 9600X. As part of the new Ryzen 9000 family, it gave us their latest Zen 5 cores to the desktop market, as AMD actually launched Zen 5 through their mobile platform last month, the Ryzen AI 300 series (which we reviewed).

Our interpretation is that AMD has run into enough issues on the Ryzen 7000 series with games inadvertently straddling multiple CCDs, that they have decided it's better to bite the bullet and use the PPM driver here as well, even with the extra complexity it entails. In essence, it would be all the same rationale for why AMD implemented the PPM driver for the Ryzen 7000X3D chips in the first place: due to the poor die-to-die latency, having game threads spread out over multiple CCDs is bad for performance. Though it does awkwardly suggest that the existing Ryzen 9 7900X/7950X processors are under-performing due to their loosely managed thread allocations, which in turn may be why AMD doesn't want to talk about the issue in any detail.

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