Ryzen

Ryzen is a brand of multi-core x86-64 microprocessors, designed and marketed by AMD for desktop, mobile, server, and embedded platforms, based on the Zen microarchitecture. It consists of central processing units marketed for mainstream, enthusiast, server, and workstation segments; accelerated processing units, marketed for mainstream and entry-level segments and embedded systems applications.
A majority of AMD's consumer Ryzen products use the AM4 and AM5 platforms. In August 2017, AMD launched their Ryzen Threadripper line aimed at the enthusiast and workstation markets. Ryzen Threadripper uses different, larger sockets such as TR4, sTRX4, sWRX8, and sTR5, which support additional memory channels and PCI Express lanes. AMD moved to the AM5 platform for consumer desktop Ryzen with the release of Zen 4 products in late 2022.

History

Background

Ryzen uses the Zen CPU microarchitecture, a redesign that returned AMD to the high-end CPU market after a decade of near-total absence since 2006. AMD's primary competitor, Intel, had largely dominated this market segment starting from the 2006 release of their Core microarchitecture and the Core 2 Duo. Similarly, Intel had abandoned their prior Pentium 4 lineup, as its NetBurst microarchitecture was uncompetitive with AMD's Athlon XP in terms of price and efficiency, and with their Athlon 64 and 64 X2, they were outmatched in terms of raw performance as well.
Until Ryzen's initial launch in early 2017, Intel's market dominance over AMD continued to grow with the launch of the Intel Core CPU lineup and branding, as well as the successful rollout of their now well-known tick-tock CPU release strategy. The strategy was most famous for alternating between a new CPU microarchitecture and a new fabrication node each year. Intel followed that release cadence for almost a decade, starting with Intel's initial Q3 2006 launch of 65 nm Conroe, and continuing until the release of the 14 nm Broadwell desktop CPUs, which were delayed a year from a planned 2014 launch to Q3 2015. The delay necessitated a refresh of their pre-existing 22 nm Haswell CPU lineup in the form of Devil's Canyon, and thus officially ended tick-tock as a practice. The events proved to be incredibly important for AMD, as Intel's inability to further sustain tick-tock was critically important in providing both the initial and continually growing market openings for AMD's Ryzen CPUs, and indeed the Zen CPU microarchitecture as a whole to succeed.
Also of note is the release of AMD's Bulldozer microarchitecture in 2011, which, despite being a ground up CPU design like Zen, had been designed and optimized for parallel computing above all else, leading to starkly inferior real-world performance in any workload that was not highly multi-threaded, which was still the case for the vast majority at that time. This caused it to be woefully uncompetitive in essentially every area outside of raw multi-thread performance and its use in low power APUs with integrated Radeon graphics. Despite a die shrink and several revisions of the Bulldozer architecture, performance and power efficiency failed to catch up with Intel's competing products. Consequently, all of this forced AMD to completely abandon the entire high-end CPU market until Ryzen's release in 2017.
Ryzen is the consumer-level implementation of the newer Zen microarchitecture, a complete redesign that marked the return of AMD to the high-end central processing unit market, offering a product range capable of competing with Intel. Having more processing cores, Ryzen processors offer greater multi-threaded performance at the same price point relative to Intel's Core processors. The Zen architecture delivers more than 52% improvement in instructions per cycle over the prior-generation Bulldozer AMD core, without raising electrical power use. The changes to the instruction set architecture also adds binary-code compatibility to AMD's CPU.
Since the release of Ryzen, AMD's CPU market share has increased while Intel's appears to have stagnated or regressed.

Release

AMD announced a new series of processors on December 13, 2016, named Ryzen, and delivered them in Q1 2017, the first of several generations. The 1000 series featured up to eight cores and sixteen threads, with a 52% instructions per cycle increase over their prior CPU products, namely AMD's previous Excavator microarchitecture.
The second generation of Ryzen processors, the Ryzen 2000 series, released in April 2018, featured the Zen+ microarchitecture. The aggregate performance increased 10%. Most importantly, Zen+ fixed the cache and memory latencies that had been major weak points.
The third generation of Ryzen processors launched on July 7, 2019, based on AMD's Zen 2 architecture, featuring significant design improvements with a 15% average IPC boost, a doubling of floating point capability to a full 256-bit-wide execution data path much like Intel's Haswell released in 2014, a shift to an multi-chip module style chiplet package design, and a further shrink to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company 's 7 nm fabrication process.
On June 16, 2020, AMD announced new Ryzen 3000XT series processors with increased boost clocks and other small performance enhancements compared to 3000X processors.
On October 8, 2020, AMD announced the Zen 3 architecture for their Ryzen 5000 series processors, featuring a 19% IPC improvement over Zen 2, while being built on the same 7 nm TSMC node with out-of-the-box operating boost frequencies exceeding 5 GHz for the first time since AMD's Piledriver. This was followed by an unusually short stop-gap release of Ryzen 6000 mobile-only series processors on January 4, 2022, using the modestly changed Zen 3+ core on a 6 nm process by TSMC, with claims up to 15% performance uplift gains from frequency rather than IPC.
The Ryzen 7000 series was released September 27, 2022 for desktops, featuring the new Zen 4 core with a 13% uplift in IPC and 15% increase in frequency for a claimed nearly 30% in single thread performance. The Ryzen 7000 series also features a brand new AM5 socket and uses DDR5 memory.

Threadripper series

Threadripper, which is geared for high-end desktops and professional workstations, was not developed as part of a business plan or a specific roadmap. Instead, a small team inside AMD saw an opportunity to develop the benefits of Ryzen and EPYC CPU roadmaps, so as to give AMD the lead in desktop CPU performance. After some progress was made in their spare time, the project was greenlit and put in an official roadmap by 2016.

Ryzen AI

Ryzen AI is the brand name for AMD's AI technology, based on intellectual property from AMD's acquisition of Xilinx. AMD Ryzen AI can work across a neural processing unit powered by XDNA architecture, based on AI engines, a Radeon graphics engine, and Ryzen processor cores. Introduced on the [|Ryzen 7040] mobile series in mid 2023, it can be used to run neural network applications such as camera background effects, voice recognition, photo artifact removal and skin smoothing. Neural network tasks can be computationally intensive to run on a general-purpose CPU, resulting in significant energy usage and a larger thermal footprint. An AI accelerator is a coprocessor specifically designed to process neural networks efficiently, similar in concept to other work-offloading specialized processing units such as video decoders or FPGAs.
Software support for Microsoft Windows was made widely available in December 2023, while software support for Linux was introduced in January 2024.

Product lineup

Ryzen 1000

Desktop

Socket AM4 for Ryzen and Socket TR4 for Ryzen Threadripper.
Based on first generation Zen. Ryzen CPUs based on Summit Ridge architecture. Threadripper based on Whitehaven architecture.
4.8 billion transistors per 192 mm² 8-core "Zeppelin" die with one die being used for Ryzen and two for Ryzen Threadripper.
Stepping: B1
Memory support:
* Ryzen dual-channel: DDR4–2666 ×2 single rank, DDR4–2400 ×2 dual rank, DDR4–2133 ×4 single rank, or DDR4–1866 ×4 dual rank.
* Ryzen Threadripper quad-channel: DDR4–2666 ×4 single rank, DDR4–2400 ×4 dual rank, DDR4–2133 ×8 single rank, or DDR4–1866 ×8 dual rank.
Instructions sets: x87, MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AES, CLMUL, AVX, AVX2, FMA3, CVT16/F16C, ABM, BMI1, BMI2, SHA.
All Ryzen-branded CPUs feature unlocked multipliers.
AMD's SenseMI Technology monitors the processor continuously and uses Infinity Control Fabric to offer the following features:
* Pure Power reduces the entire ramp of processor voltage and clock speed, for light loads.
* Precision Boost increases the processor voltage and clock speed by 100–200 MHz if three or more cores are active ; and significantly further when less than three are active.
* XFR aims to maintain the average clock speed closer to the maximum Precision Boost, when sufficient cooling is available.
* Neural Net Prediction and Smart Prefetch use perceptron based neural branch prediction inside the processor to optimize instruction workflow and cache management.
Ryzen launched in conjunction with a line of stock coolers for Socket AM4: the Wraith Stealth, Wraith Spire and Wraith Max. This line succeeds the original AMD Wraith cooler, which was released in mid-2016. The Wraith Stealth is a bundled low-profile unit meant for the lower-end CPUs with a rating for a TDP of 65 W, whereas the Wraith Spire is the bundled mainstream cooler with a TDP rating of 95 W, along with optional RGB lighting on certain models. The Wraith Max is a larger cooler incorporating heatpipes, rated at 140 W TDP.
In December 2019, AMD started producing first generation Ryzen products built using the second generation Zen+ architecture. An example is the Ryzen 5 1600, with new batches having an "AF" identifier instead of its usual "AE", essentially being an underbinned Ryzen 5 2600 with the same specifications as the original Ryzen 5 1600.

Model line	Codename	Architecture	Core count	Integrated graphics
Ryzen Threadripper 1000	Whitehaven	Zen	8–16	rowspan=3
Ryzen 1000 / 1000X	Summit Ridge	Zen	4–8	-
Ryzen 1000	Pinnacle Ridge	Zen+	4–6	-