AMD’s 9th gen chips just aren’t that exciting.
THE CURIOUS CASE
of the 9000 series chips. That’s what we should call AMD’s latest processor launch, because, boy, are these things underwhelming. OK, that’s not entirely fair—they are still good processors on the surface—but you have to look at them in a specific light. There are a lot of similarities between how AMD has marketed these chips and how Nvidia launched its RTX 4080 Super card.
What do we mean? Well, on the surface, there’s not a whole lot of change here. The architecture has shifted to TSMC’s N4 FinFET manufacturing process, down from N5 (theoretically 4nm now), but the I/O is still running on N6. Similarly, clock speeds are close to identical, with the max boost on both topping out at 5.6GHz. The core clock actually dropped to 4.4GHz on the 9900X. Total L3 cache is the same as well, with the only slight tweak being an increase to L1 cache (going from 32KB to 48KB)—not exactly revolutionary. And core and thread counts remain the same.