AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs confirmed to arrive by September

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AMD’s Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs will be launched before the current quarter is out, meaning September at the latest.

As Tom’s Hardware reports, CEO Lisa Su confirmed this release timeframe in an earnings call following the revelation of AMD’s Q2 fiscal results.

Su said: “Looking ahead, we’re on track to launch our all-new 5nm Ryzen 7000 desktop processors and AM5 platforms later this quarter with leadership performance in gaming and content creation.”

Previously, AMD had been telling us to expect its next-gen Zen 4-based processors in the fall, which could theoretically have meant October or November, but this narrows it down to Q3 definitively.

The AM5 platform refers to the new chipset for Zen 4 – it’ll require a new socket, and therefore a motherboard upgrade – and the mention of the launch coming later in Q3 means it’ll almost certainly be September.

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Analysis: Pipping Intel to the launch post

Of course, technically saying it’ll be this quarter means that Zen 4 chips might arrive in either August or September, but the former seems too close, based on what the rumor mill has been telling us pretty consistently now. Namely that September is the month to watch for the Ryzen 7000 launch, with the idea of a mid-September launch being floated a couple of times.

It looks like we will be treated to something in the form of a teaser or initial reveal in August, mind, as the rumor mill has discovered that AMD is set to do something along these lines for Zen 4 chips at an event on August 5. So we’ll (hopefully) find out what that is in just a couple of days, though we’re not expecting much in the way of details at this point.

A further rumor contends that we will see the Ryzen 9 7950X and 7900X, Ryzen 7 7700X, plus the Ryzen 5 7600X as the initial launch line-up, which is interesting as we were expecting the 7800X rather than 7700X. With Ryzen 5000, AMD elected to push out the 5800X, not 5700X, in the initial batch of CPUs released, but with the new range, the 7700X would be a better option (for the majority) as a more affordable 8-core model.

This would make Ryzen 7000 a slightly more potent force going up against Intel’s CPUs, which are currently Alder Lake (12th-gen), but are about to transition Raptor Lake. However, Intel’s 13th-gen processors aren’t expected to go on sale until October, so it’s looking like AMD could win the race of the next-gen CPUs vying to reach the shelves first.

In the aforementioned earnings call, Su also told us that next-gen RDNA 3 graphics cards are still set to launch later in 2022, but didn’t get any more specific than this (and we have, of course, heard that before – though it’s at least confirmation that things are still on track).

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Your next ultrafast SSD might be here sooner than you think

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The next generation of storage is about to get its biggest drop yet, the Samsung 990 Pro, at least if a recent regulatory filing is anything to go by.

The Samsung 980 Pro remains one of the best SSDs available, but it still relies on the last-gen PCIe 4.0 interface, which limits its transfer speeds and potential capacity. With PCIe 5.0, however, SSD technology is making the same kind of generational leap as we've seen with the best graphics cards and processors in recent years.

The filing, with the Korean National Radio Research Agency (RRA), was first spotted by Twitter leaker harukaze5719, and it lists two SKUs from Samsung: MZ-V9P2T0 and MZ-V9P1T0.

Samsung 990 PRO SSD (1TB/2TB)It will be M.2 NVMe, PCIe 5.0. 2280? 2580? idk.memo : 980 PRO is MZ-V8P1T00https://t.co/PQBYA8rENZ pic.twitter.com/T1v03JkPSAAugust 2, 2022

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Harukaze5719 said that they can't say for sure that this next-gen SSD will be PCIe 5.0 compatible, and nobody really can since we have no official word from Samsung on the matter. But it almost certainly will be, considering Intel Alder Lake supports PCIe 5.0 already and so will AMD Zen 4, which is expected to launch in as little as a few weeks.

As Wccftech points out, Samsung has already released a PCIe 5.0 compatible SSD for servers, the PM1743, and so the consumer SSDs to come would naturally follow suit. This is especially true given that Samsung will likely release the new SSDs later in the year or possibly CES 2023, by which point PCIe 5.0 compatible processors and motherboards will be more widely available, so there will be a greater demand for PCIe 5.0 hardware.

And while we don't know how fast the new SSDs will be, we can expect them to be substantially faster than even the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSDs on the market right now, like the Samsung 980 Pro. That SSD is capable of 3,305.03MB/s during the CrystalDiskMark Random Q32 benchmark in our Samsung 980 Pro review, while PCIe 5.0 enabled the PM1743 to achieve an astonishing 13GB/s random read speed when Intel demoed its Alder Lake chips late last year.

That's a greater than four-fold increase in random read speeds, which is how most files are transfered under real-world conditions, and it's going to have a huge performance impact on everything from loading times while playing the best PC games to software updates, installations, and more.

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Analysis: we're getting there, folks

The PCIe 5.0 standard has seemingly taken forever to become reality. Whether it was the Covid lockdowns in 2020 (and 2022), supply chain issues or just delays on the part of chipmakers to get compliant chips out the door and into customers' computers, the wait for PCIe 5.0 and its promised impact feels like forever.

With the release of Intel Alder Lake and the upcoming release of AMD Zen 4 chips, the two biggest consumer chipmakers will now support the standard with their latest processors. And since hardware makers have been waiting on Intel and AMD — after all, no PCIe 5.0 hardware release makes sense unless the CPU that's driving the computer supports the next-gen standard — once AMD releases its Ryzen 7000 series chips, component manufacturers can start rolling out their next-gen hardware and feel confident that there will be a consumer base willing and able to buy these new components.

Much like the extended 5G rollout in parts of North America and Europe were, until recently, advancing at a glacial pace, it looks like PCIe 5.0's extremely slow start could lead to the standard that finally delivers on that awesome speed promise.  

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SK hynix is about to demo an SSD unlike any you've seen before

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Semiconductor company SK hynix is preparing to demo a new type of storage device, developed in partnership with the US Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

At the upcoming Flash Memory Summit, the company is expected to present the world’s first Key Value Store Computational Storage Device (KV-CSD), the purpose of which is to accelerate the analysis of large volumes of data.

This objective is achieved by embedding indexing capabilities into the storage device itself, which means data can be written and indexed almost simultaneously. LANL says the approach can accelerate some of its simulation data analysis workloads by up to 1000x.

Computational storage with a twist

Computational storage has been billed by market players as one of the next big things in computing for a number of years now, minimizing bottlenecks created by the need to pass data between storage and the CPU, GPU and RAM.

Broadly, there are two types of such systems: those that incorporate processors into the storage device itself and those that pass compute operations to a storage accelerator located close to the storage drive.

Although computational storage is not appropriate for every use case, it has the potential to dramatically accelerate applications that are limited by I/O performance rather than compute.

“There is clearly a broad class of applications that benefit from offloading compute functions from a main CPU to a more efficient processing engine that is more suited to the specific problem of interest,” said Richard New, VP of Research at Western Digital, in conversation with TechRadar Pro last month.

“In the context of storage, we can think of applications like video transcoding, compression, database acceleration as falling into this category.”

However, while computational storage devices (CSDs) are under development at a number of companies, this is said to be the first time anyone has successfully incorporated indexing functionality into such a device.

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According to representatives of SK hynix and LANL, the development of the KV-CSD is something to celebrate for all organizations handling large-scale simulation data and engaged in big data analytics.

“Demonstrations like this show it is possible to build an ordered KV-CSD that moves the ordering and indexing of data as close to the storage device as possible, maximizing the wins on retrieval from on-the-fly indexing as data is written to the storage,” said Gary Grider, who heads up HPC at LANL.

“The ordering capability enables range queries that are particularly useful in computational science applications as well as point queries that key value storage is known for.”

The KV-CSD remains a prototype for now, with development work still to be undertaken before it can be deployed in a production environment at LANL. It is also unclear whether the terms of the agreement between the collaborators might delay SK hynix in bringing the technology to the mass market.

Either way, murmurings from across the semiconductor industry suggest we’ll be hearing a lot about CSDs in the months and years to come.

• Our list of the best high-capacity hard drives and SSDs on the market

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This could be the most powerful SSD ever made, but your PC can't use it

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Phison has partnered with Seagate to launch its most advanced SSD yet. 

The Phison X1 SSD boasts an impressive amount of performance while barely pulling any power. The U.3 Enterprise PCle Gen4x4 eTLC SSD is the most advanced SSD Phison has ever built, an advance made possible, because of the two performance and a power efficient ARM R5 CPU and dozens of small CPU co-processors.

The company says the X1 platform has been built to give users the best of both worlds - outstanding performance and power consumption. This is accomplished by using two high-end ARM cores paired up with dozens of small co-processing chips that complete tasks at lightning speed while consuming very little juice.

Raising the bar

“Current industry solutions miss the mark and the X1 reinforces Phison’s commitment to elevate the bar in enterprise storage by delivering the world’s best-in-class enterprise SSD,” said Sebastien Jean, Chief Technology Officer of Phison. 

“Coupled with Seagate’s deep industry knowledge and Phison’s advanced architecture, the X1 SSD was created to bolster the industry’s enterprise-class product offerings for a variety of applications such as AI, Cloud Storage and 5G edge computing.”

Phison also highlighted how IT professionals know that lagging computing environments with tens or hundreds of employees running similar programs from centralized servers is an issue - and that the X1 SSD provides the fastest application speeds to help accomplish more.

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The company says the X1 offers an optimal storage solution for use in artificial intelligence applications due to its high random read IOPs and faster performance versus competitors, and can also transform raw data into actionable intelligence with greater efficiency.

“We combined Seagate’s proprietary data management and customer integration capabilities with Phison’s cutting-edge technology to create highly customized SSDs that meet the ever-evolving needs of the enterprise storage market,” said Sai Varanasi, senior vice president of product and business marketing at Seagate Technology. 

“Seagate is excited to partner with Phison on developing advanced SSD technology to provide the industry with increased density, higher performance and power efficiency for all mass capacity storage providers.”

• These are the best SSDs for your PC

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Compute Express Link (CXL) 3.0 Announced: Doubled Speeds and Flexible Fabrics

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While it’s technically still the new kid on the block, the Compute Express Link (CXL) standard for host-to-device connectivity has quickly taken hold in the server market. Designed to offer a rich I/O feature set built on top of the existing PCI-Express standards – most notably cache-coherency between devices – CXL is being prepared for use in everything from better connecting CPUs to accelerators in servers, to being able to attach DRAM and non-volatile storage over what’s physically still a PCIe interface. It’s an ambitious and yet widely-backed roadmap that in three short years has made CXL the de facto advanced device interconnect standard, leading to rivals standards Gen-Z, CCIX, and as of yesterday, OpenCAPI, all dropping out of the race.

And while the CXL Consortium is taking a quick victory lap this week after winning the interconnect wars, there is much more work to be done by the consortium and its members. On the product front the first x86 CPUs with CXL are just barely shipping – largely depending on what you want to call the limbo state that Intel’s Sapphire Ridge chips are in – and on the functionality front, device vendors are asking for more bandwidth and more features than were in the original 1.x releases of CXL. Winning the interconnect wars makes CXL the king of interconnects, but in the process, it means that CXL needs to be able to address some of the more complex use cases that rival standards were being designed for.

To that end, at Flash Memory Summit 2022 this week, the CXL Consortium is at the show to announce the next full version of the CXL standard, CXL 3.0. Following up on the 2.0 standard, which was released at the tail-end of 2020 and introduced features such as memory pooling and CXL switches, CXL 3.0 focuses on major improvements in a couple of critical areas for the interconnect. The first of which is the physical side, where is CXL doubling its per-lane throughput to 64 GT/second. Meanwhile, on the logical side of matters, CXL 3.0 is greatly expanding the logical capabilities of the standard, allowing for complex connection topologies and fabrics, as well as more flexible memory sharing and memory access modes within a group of CXL devices.

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Intel Raptor Lake CPU leaks leave some gamers disappointed (again)

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Intel’s Raptor Lake processors have witnessed a bunch of fresh leaks, including some game benchmarks, and a hefty overclock to 6GHz for the Core i7-13700K.

Let’s start with those gaming tests which were conducted by Extreme Player, a Bilibili-based leaker who aired benchmarks for the Core i9-13900K a couple of weeks back. This time around, the Core i7-13700K and Core i5-13600K have been put through their paces, although bear in mind all the usual caveats around these being purported early engineering (pre-release) sample chips.

The results have been causing some worry – much like the previous 13900K spillage – as on the face of it, some of the benchmarks feel rather underwhelming. The scores are summarized in some neat charts compiled by @harukaze5719 on Twitter (via VideoCardz).

Every time I see data like this, I think "how much did it improve in the end?" It is difficult to get an answerSo, I make my own chart that I want.Overall conclusion is enough with this chart. But still need to maintain a critical attitude. https://t.co/D4FA0vzJJ8 pic.twitter.com/GNcCfVsZXDJuly 31, 2022

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So, the upshot is that at Full HD, the 13700K only witnessed gains of around 6% to 7% in average frame rates across a selection of games (including Apex Legends, Far Cry 6, and Red Dead Redemption 2) compared to its Alder Lake predecessor. The 13600K sample chip fared better with a jump of around 10% to 11% when pitted against the 12600K.

Gains at 1440p were more modest for both Raptor Lake processors at 4% to 5%, and at 4K this was even more the case, with improvements to the tune of 2% to 4% (with GPU bottlenecking at 4K meaning there was no difference between the 12th and 13th-gen CPUs with some games).

Some of these results, and some of the individual benchmarks, have had a lukewarm reception as a result – and particularly the performance of the 13700K – but we shouldn’t get carried away by pre-release benchmarking as we’ll discuss shortly.

Furthermore, VideoCardz also spotted another pair of leaks of a purported Core i7-13700K sample CPU where the processor was overclocked to 5.8GHz and 6GHz respectively. In the latter – buckets of salt handy with these – the Intel chip recorded a single-thread result of 983 in CPU-Z, beating out a recent Core i9-13900K leak. Do note, however, that the efficiency cores were disabled in this case, so only the eight performance cores were operational, and therefore the multi-core result was low as you’d expect (7,814 points).

A second leak witnessed the 13700K supposedly running at 5.8GHz, this time with all cores (including efficiency ones) running, and it achieved a single-thread score of 947 and multi-thread result of 12,896. Even that 947 is 12% faster than the 12900K (at 5.2GHz) in CPU-Z single-thread, so that’s impressive stuff.

In other news, as Tweaktown reports, Intel Raptor Lake laptop CPUs have officially been confirmed as arriving before the end of 2022, according to Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger (as mentioned on a Q2 earnings call). The 13th-gen desktop processors will turn up first, and are expected to be launched in late September, likely with an October on-sale date.

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Analysis: Some mixed signals on Raptor Lake – but don’t get too worried yet

We observed some fears and concerns being aired when leaked benchmarks surfaced for the 13900K recently, also from Extreme Player on Bilibili, indicating around 5% to 7% improvements for average frame rates compared to its predecessor. It’s pretty much the same story for the 13700K here, then, but we have to bear some key points in mind.

First of all, these are just leaks, and as with all pre-release sample chips, they aren’t going to be as fast as the finished product – and they’re also running with early BIOS versions for 13th-gen motherboards. We’re not getting the full story, essentially, on the performance front – and the second (CPU-Z) leak, showing a seriously overclocked 13700K, is entirely more promising anyway (though the same skepticism and caveats must be applied to that, naturally).

It's actually pretty impressive to see the 13600K offering a 10% uptick in games at this stage, given that Raptor Lake is just a simple refresh of Alder Lake after all. What’s also worth noting is that the game benchmarks show some good improvements in minimum frame rates – the lowest fps recorded, in other words – with both the 13600K and 13700K hiked up to the tune of 11% to 14%. And ensuring those plunges to low frame rates don’t end up as jerky as with their Alder Lake counterparts is a very worthwhile boon.

In summary, let’s not take the wobblier bits of this latest leakage too much to heart, as for us, looking at the overall landscape of Raptor Lake rumors – and leaks have been coming fast of late – it still looks like Intel’s 13th-gen is shaping up nicely enough.

We’ve said before that big gains are anticipated – and needed – from AMD’s next-gen Ryzen 7000 (Zen 4) processors, so the fight between Team Red and Team Blue’s new CPU ranges promises to be a close one.

If performance is indeed a near run thing, though, there could be other deciding factors, including price (obviously), and the maturity of the platform. By the latter, we mean that this is the last outing for Intel’s current (Alder Lake) socket, whereas Zen 4 will be the first incarnation for AM5 motherboards.

What that means is those who buy a new PC with an AM5 mobo can expect to be able to directly upgrade to a future Ryzen CPU without having to switch out that motherboard – which won’t be the case for Intel’s following 14th-gen chips (Meteor Lake, due to arrive in 2023).

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The Intel Core i9-12900KS Review: The Best of Intel's Alder Lake, and the Hottest

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As far as top-tier CPU SKUs go, Intel's Core i9-12900KS processor sits in noticeably sharp In contrast to the launch of AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor with 96 MB of 3D V-Cache. Whereas AMD's over-the-top chip was positioned as the world's fastest gaming processor, for their fastest chip, Intel has kept their focus on trying to beat the competition across the board and across every workload.

As the final 12th Generation Core (Alder Lake) desktop offering from Intel, the Core i9-12900KS is unambiguously designed to be the powerful one. It's a "special edition" processor, meaning that it's low-volume, high-priced chip aimed at customers who need or want the fastest thing possible, damn the price or the power consumption.

It's a strategy that Intel has employed a couple of times now – most notably with the Coffee Lake-generation i9-9900KS – and which has been relatively successful for Intel. And to be sure, the market for such a top-end chip is rather small, but the overall mindshare impact of having the fastest chip on the market is huge. So, with Intel looking to put some distance between itself and AMD's successful Ryzen 5000 family of chips, Intel has put together what is meant to be the final (and fastest) word in Alder Lake CPU performance, shipping a chip with peak (turbo) clockspeeds ramped up to 5.5GHz for its all-important performance cores.

For today's review we're putting Alder Lake's fastest to the test, both against Intel's other chips and AMD's flagships. Does this clockspeed-boosted 12900K stand out from the crowd? And are the tradeoffs involved in hitting 5.5GHz worth it for what Intel is positioning as the fastest processor in the world? Let's find out.

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