— The Ryzen 9000 CPUs use the same I/O die as Ryzen 7000 but they have upgraded cores, moving from TSMC's 5 nm process to 4 nm. The new cores offer up to 15% more performance under cherry-picked conditions but for latency-sensitive workloads like gaming they are just few percent faster. The 9600X, 9700X, 9900X, and 9950X are priced at $280, $360, $500, and $650, respectively, making them $80-$200 USD more expensive than the 7000 series. Since the 7000 series flopped (7800X3D somewhat excluded) due to unrealistic pricing, slow boot times, high platform costs and windows gamebar requirements etc., the 9000 series is more or less DOA. When the 9000X3D variants launch (expected early 2025) gamers who play cache sensitive games such as SoTTR or Factorio with a 4090 and don’t mind frame drops may find value in the 9800X3D. Meanwhile, Intel’s 12th and 13th gen CPUs continue to offer the best value for money in today’s market. Furthermore, Intel is scheduled to launch Arrow-Lake (est. +10% performance vs 14th gen) and Lunar-Lake (vastly improved x86 battery life) later this year but they face serious challenges due to reliance on marketers who are mostly funded by AMD. Even if Arrow and Lunar Lake deliver stellar performance it may not be enough for Intel to avoid the now very real risk of bankruptcy (third worst-performing S&P500 stock from Jan to Aug 2024).
— These are early user benchmarks for the new Snapdragon ARM-based CPUs for Windows. These tests were run in x86 compatibility mode so it’s fair to assume at least a 20% performance penalty vs. native ARM applications. The results provide an approximate indication of performance for x86 applications running on the new ARM Oryon platform. Compared to the 28-watt Meteor Lake Core Ultra 5 125H, the ARM platform shows improved latency but lags in both single and multi-core performance.