AMD’s Ryzen 7900X arrives to take on Intel’s 12900K

From The Verge: Intel took the desktop CPU performance crown last year with its Core i9-12900K processor. And now, nearly a year later, AMD is ready to trade blows again with its next-generation Ryzen Zen 4 CPUs. Fabbed on TSMC’s 5nm process node, AMD has promised big gains for its latest Ryzen 7000 chips over its previous Zen 3 (Ryzen 5000 series) desktop generation.

The flagship Ryzen 9 7950X chip is priced at $699 and features 16 cores, 32 threads, and a boost clock of up to 5.7GHz. We won’t be reviewing that flagship chip just yet, as AMD has only supplied the Ryzen 9 7900X in time for review, which ships with 12 cores, 24 threads, and a 5.6GHz boost for $549. AMD promises a 13 percent instructions per clock cycle (IPC) uplift over the Ryzen 5000 series and up to a 29 percent increase in single-threaded performance.

All of these promises sound good on paper, but with Intel’s 13th Gen launch looming and the potential for an Intel chip to hit 6GHz out of the box, will AMD’s improvements be enough? I’ve been testing AMD’s Ryzen 9 7900X against Intel’s Core i9-12900K over the past week to find out.

AMD wipes the floor with Intel on creator workloads and apps with the 7900X, but gaming is more of a mixed bag.

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