Why it matters: A hardware leaker has tweeted supposed Cinebench R23 single-core scores for the upcoming Ryzen 5 7600X and Ryzen 7 7700X, and things look promising for AMD. Not only does the 7000 series trade blows with Intel’s Alder Lake, but it potentially might give upcoming Raptor Lake chips a run for their money.
Hardware leaker Greymon55 tweeted single-core Cinebench R23 scores for the upcoming Ryzen 5 7600X and Ryzen 7 7700X processors. He claims that in the single-core test, the 7600X scores from 1900 to 1999, while the 7700X achieves a score of 2000 to 2099.
With Ryzen 7000’s uplift in clock speeds and IPC (instructions per cycle), we see a healthy performance increase from the almost two-year old Ryzen 5000 series, with both of these mid-range Raphael CPUs comfortably outscoring any 5000 series chip with margins of over 25%.
This is a noteworthy single-core improvement from Zen 3 to Zen 4, but an equally interesting comparison is with Intel’s 12th-gen Alder Lake and upcoming 13th-gen Raptor Lake.
We can see the 7600X and 7700X matching and potentially beating Alder Lake, with the 7700X outscoring the 12700K and holding its own against the flagship 12900K in the single-core benchmarks. When we throw Raptor Lake into the mix — all leaked benchmarks, likely from early samples of course — things look slightly more favorable for Team Green. The 7600X and 13600K look to be neck and neck, while the 13700K edges the 7700X by around 5%. Even though this is a small win for Intel, it does look like Zen 4 will be more competitive in terms of single-core performance.
Multi-core benchmarks could paint a different picture, as the core counts remain the same on the Ryzen 7000 SKUs, while Intel will continue to use their hybrid architecture on Raptor Lake, combining performance cores with efficiency cores for a bigger overall core count.
Ryzen 7000 will introduce the brand new AM5 platform, with DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.0 support out of the box. While these are exciting features, it does pose a higher entry cost, as users will need to buy a new 600-series motherboard and DDR5 memory. Price leaks appear to indicate that Ryzen 7000 SKUs will be more expensive than their Ryzen 5000 counterparts, too.
AMD is set to unveil the Ryzen 7000 series at 7PM ET on Monday, August 29 via livestream. At the very least we can expect to have clarity about the specifications, while it remains to be seen if AMD will reveal pricing at that time. The current expected release date is September 27, which just so happens to be on the same day Intel is scheduled to announce their next-gen Raptor Lake CPUs.