Introduction

The new AMD Ryzen 9 9950X Zen 5 desktop processor is this generation’s flagship. On this chip rides AMD’s prestige in not just making microarchitectures competitive with Intel’s, but also ones that can deliver generational gains in performance and efficiency. The company is launching the upper end of its Ryzen 9000 Granite Ridge family today, which debuted last week with the mid-range Ryzen 5 9600X and performance segment Ryzen 7 9700X. In this review, we have with us the Ryzen 9 9950X 16-core processor, and its sibling, the Ryzen 9 9900X 12-core, which we’ve separately reviewed, so be sure to check that out.

The Ryzen 9 9950X is a 16-core/32-thread processor for PC enthusiasts and gamers looking for the highest AAA gaming experiences, as well as the highest multithreaded productivity, unless their use-case demands workstation hardware. All 16 cores are full-sized Zen 5, capable of reaching high boost frequencies. AMD has retained the Socket AM5 platform, which ensures your 9950X is compatible with any AMD 600-series chipset motherboard today with a BIOS update, and is drop-in compatible with upcoming motherboards based on the AMD 800-series chipset.

The new Zen 5 microarchitecture promises generational IPC gains of around 16% as claimed by AMD, but having spent enough time with the 9700X, we can say that AMD is pretty enthusiastic. AMD has given Zen 5 more queue depth across the core and faster caches, although the star attraction is its new 512-bit floating point pipe, compared to the dual-pumped 256-bit data-path of Zen 4. All this core engineering, coupled with parallelism of 16 cores, high clock speeds, and a lavish 170 W TDP or 225 W PPT, should make the 9950X the processor of choice for multithreaded productivity with gaming on the side; or gaming with some premium streaming content creation workloads running in the background.

The Ryzen 9 9950X Granite Ridge is a chiplet-based processor, much like its predecessors going all the way back to the 3950X from 2019. The CPU cores are located in CPU core complex dies (CCDs), which AMD built on the 4 nm TSMC N4P node. This new node offers a 22% power reduction over the 5 nm N5 node that the Zen 4 CCDs are built on. The 6 nm client I/O die (cIOD) is carried over unchanged from the Ryzen 7000 Raphael, allowing AMD to save development costs. The I/O die is pretty loaded, with its dual-channel DDR5 memory interface, a 28-lane PCIe Gen 5 root, and a basic Radeon iGPU based on the RDNA 2 architecture, which has just enough muscle to do all the things the iGPU of Intel Core i9-14900K can, essentially 2D productivity.

AMD has given the Ryzen 9 9950X a base frequency of 4.30 GHz, with 5.70 GHz boost. The maximum boost frequency is unchanged from the previous-generation 7950X, and the base frequency is lowered by 200 MHz, but then that’s what the generational IPC gain and process improvements are for—to deliver more performance and better boost residency, respectively. Each of the 16 cores comes with 1 MB of L2 cache, which AMD has doubled the bandwidth and associativity of over Zen 4; and each of the two 8-core CCDs contains a 32 MB L3 cache shared within the CCD.

AMD is pricing the Ryzen 9 9950X at $650, which is $50 cheaper than the 7950X at launch, which is now going for around $540. Since it is a flagship part, AMD is training its guns on the Intel Core i9-14900K; but then there’s a dark horse—the Ryzen 9 7950X3D. The company was pretty clear in the run-up to this launch that the 9950X and 9700X won’t beat the 7950X3D and 7800X3D at gaming, and those two Zen 4 + 3D V-cache chips are widely available, for less money. The Ryzen 9 9950X hence has its task cut out for it—to put its high core-count, power limits, and clock speeds to use and be something to look forward to.