AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D vs AMD Ryzen 9 9950X

AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D

AMD Ryzen 9 9950X

The Ryzen 9 9950X is a very, very powerful desktop CPU of the Granite Ridge product family that features 16 Zen 5 cores (32 threads), PCIe 5 support and a basic iGPU. The Ryzen was launched in June 2024, with sales slated to start in August.

The 9950X shares some of the specifications with the mighty Zen 4-powered Ryzen 9 7950X, including (but not limited to) the 16 MB L2 cache, the 64 MB L3 cache, the 5.7 GHz top clock speed and the 170 W long-term TDP.

Architecture and Features

Just like Strix Point APUs, Granite Ridge processors make use of the new Zen 5 microarchitecture. However, there are no efficient cores here; all of 9950X's cores are full Zen 5 cores. Furthermore, Granite Ridge is a multi-die design with only the CPU cores produced using a fairly modern 4 nm TSMC process. Strix Point processors are a single-die design, from what we know.

According to AMD, Zen 5 delivers a 16% IPC improvement over Zen 4 thanks to branch prediction improvements and other refinements.

Elsewhere, the 9950X has an impressive 64 MB of L3 cache and 24 direct PCIe 5 lanes (3.93 GB/s throughput per lane) with up to 12 additional PCIe 4 lanes available depending on the motherboard. It supports DDR5 RAM as fast as 5,600 MT/s (up to 8,000 MT/s if overclocked).

The 9950X is unlocked for overclocking. Naturally, the AM5 socket CPU supports Windows 11, 64-bit Windows 10 as well as many Linux distros.

Performance

According to early July leaks, its multi-thread performance is about as good as that of the 24-core Core i9-14900K Intel CPU. We'll definitely update this section once we get our hands on a system powered by the 9950X.

Graphics

The Radeon 610M comes equipped with just 128 unified shaders running at up to 2,200 MHz. Its gaming performance is slated to be extremely low and only just sufficient for pre-2020 games in resolutions such as 1024x768.

Power consumption

The CPU cores are built with TSMC's N4P process for good, as of mid 2024, power efficiency. (Apple is the leader in this regard with the second-generation 3 nm process.)

The Ryzen 9's long-term TDP is 170 W. It'll probably consume up to 250 W when under heavy short-term loads. If overclocked, the power consumption figures will increase significantly.