AMD has finally revealed the launch prices for its new range of Ryzen 9000 desktop CPUs, and it’s pricing them slightly lower than the Ryzen 7000 launch prices. The flagship Ryzen 9 9950X with 16 cores will be priced at $649, which is $50 less than the $699 Ryzen 9 7950X that launched nearly two years ago. The rest of the lineup are priced between $20 and $50 less than equivalent Ryzen 7000 CPUs.
After a delay to the launch of its Ryzen 9000 CPUs “out of an abundance of caution,” the Ryzen 7 9700X ($359) and Ryzen 5 9600X ($279) will both launch on August 8th, followed by the Ryzen 9 9950X ($649) and Ryzen 9 9900X ($499) on August 15th.
AMD is promising around a 16 percent instructions per cycle (IPC) uplift in performance over the previous-generation Ryzen CPUs, with big promises of performance gains in both productivity tasks and gaming.
AMD is also launching new X870 and X870E motherboard chipsets for these new Ryzen 9000 series CPUs, but these motherboards won’t be available at launch. Fortunately, these new Ryzen 9000 CPUs work in any existing AM5 motherboards, a socket that AMD has committed to support until at least 2027.
AMD’s new CPUs arrive just as Intel, its main rival, struggles with crashing and stability issues with its 13th and 14th Gen desktop CPUs. Intel has discovered the root cause of the problems and is planning to issue a microcode fix in the coming weeks, but existing CPUs that are already damaged from too-high voltages will need to be replaced.