It feels like AMD is in its Intel era

Being the underdog has its advantages. AMD is capitalizing on the momentum of its tough battle against Intel – and it's worked.

Over the past seven years, AMD has gone from being a second-rate CPU maker, measured only by how much it could undercut the competition from Intel, to an absolute titan. Each generation, the company has consistently released some of the best processors money can buy, and even when Intel strikes back, AMD holds its ground.

But this year, everything feels different. Ryzen 9000, the company's latest chips, look mediocre by comparison. It feels like a lineup we'd expect from a company with nothing to lose. It feels like Intel – and not in a good way.

Seven years of struggle

We have to go back to 2017 when this journey began. AMD was about to release its Zen microarchitecture to the world. It was something completely different from Team Red and a shake-up that the company needed. Before Zen, AMD had spent six years honing its Bulldozer microarchitecture – an architecture that almost bankrupted the company. The focus with Zen was on performance per core, as opposed to the multi-threaded approach of the Bulldozer variants in previous years. Instead of being the low-cost alternative, AMD wanted to challenge Intel's crown.

And it worked. AMD originally targeted a 40% IPC increase with Zen and achieved a 52% IPC increase after the design was completed. While there were some issues at launch, Ryzen was an undeniable success.

“For years, Intel has fed us incremental improvements to its architecture, especially in terms of power efficiency, claiming that its processors have reached the pinnacle of what's possible for x86 in terms of performance. Then AMD Ryzen comes along with a much smaller R&D budget and at least matches Intel's power efficiency and sometimes even surpasses it, while often delivering better performance,” TechPowerUp wrote in its review of the Ryzen 7 1800X.

Ah, yes, Intel. The backdrop to Zen was Intel's apathetic approach to CPUs. Years passed, generations came out, and Intel delivered about a 5% performance increase per clock cycle with each new CPU series. AMD didn't know Intel would adjust to this rhythm – work on Zen began in 2012 – but AMD was surely ready to capitalize on a market that was tired of getting the same sidestep processors that Intel released every year.

You don't have to take my word for it either. In 2016, before the launch of Zen, AMD had only 9% of the desktop CPU market. According to the latest figures from Mercury Research, the company now holds almost 24% of the market. Some even say that AMD will be more popular than Intel by 2024.

AMD did it by consistently bringing great products to market, while Intel struggled to develop a new strategy. Ryzen 2000 came out in 2018 with the Zen+ design, optimizing the original core. Ryzen 3000 came a year later with Zen 2, cementing AMD's position as the market leader. And then Ryzen 5000 came along two years later, putting AMD at the top of the gaming stack with processors like the Ryzen 7 5800X3D.

Reviews from the time of the original Zen launch read like a prophecy: “With the release of the new Ryzen processors, a new era begins for AMD, making the company competitive again against the giant Intel. Whether Ryzen is for you or not, this restored rivalry will benefit us all, be it in terms of performance, features or price,” wrote TechPowerUp.

Competitiveness has returned, which is something we've seen over the past few years. Intel got its act together and released Alder Lake to compete with Ryzen 5000. Then AMD hit back with Ryzen 7000, which remained competitive all the way up to Intel's 13th and 14th generation CPUs. There are standout CPUs like the Ryzen 7 7800X3D if you're only interested in gaming, but for the past few years it's been an open question whether AMD or Intel is better.

Two factors

Which brings us to today and the release of Ryzen 9000. AMD reported a 16% IPC gain over the previous generation, which seems downright ridiculous when you compare it to the 52% we saw on the original Zen microarchitecture. And even by today's standards, where innovation in the desktop processor world is slowing down, the new Ryzen 9000 CPUs offer only a marginal increase over their last-gen counterparts.

I will never criticize a new architecture. It takes years – literally hundreds of thousands of hours – to develop something like Zen 5 in Ryzen 9000. And as smaller nodes take longer and longer to produce, designers today don't have the easy wins they did in 2017. AMD can't deliver the massive performance boost we saw seven years ago, even if it had the very best intention in the world. But there is still a certain level of status quo that AMD is adjusting to, much like we saw with Intel.

This particularly applies to AMD's 3D V-Cache. It's no secret that the extra cache is a huge benefit for PC gaming, and we've seen with processors like the Ryzen 9 7950X3D that AMD is able to deliver productivity power and gaming performance in equal measure. AMD has also shown how 3D V-Cache benefits its Epyc server CPUs, demonstrating how the technology can benefit workloads beyond gaming as well.

And yet, it will be several months before we have 3D V-Cache versions of the Ryzen 9000 CPUs. We saw Zen 4 CPUs struggle to get going last generation before their 3D V-Cache versions appeared. Now, with Ryzen 9000, we're seeing a repeat. I wouldn't be talked into buying a new CPU if I knew a better version was coming in a few months.

Until now, Intel hasn't had a clear answer to 3D V-Cache. It's currently AMD's secret weapon, giving it an undeniable edge in gaming performance, not only over Intel's competition, but also over AMD's main CPU lineup. Given the lukewarm reception of Ryzen 9000, I have to wonder if this segmentation within AMD's lineup makes sense. Wouldn't it be better to only offer 3D V-Cache chips from the start?

The other factor that comes into play is price. AMD is used to quickly slashing prices on the CPUs it releases. So much so that the company even lowered the MSRP of all Ryzen 9000 CPUs to better reflect how much they would actually cost at retail. AMD is also significantly slashing prices on last-gen components, which has created a situation with Ryzen 9000 where you almost always get more for your money if you opt for a last-gen chip.

Intel has done this many times in the past, and we most recently saw it with 13th and 14th Gen CPUs. Since the 14th Gen offers only modest performance gains, it made more sense to buy a 13th Gen chip at launch due to the lower price.

Only one generation

Ryzen 9000 is only one generation, so you can't say AMD is settling for the status quo like Intel did for years. But the signs are definitely there. With a dribbling rollout of 3D V-Cache, disappointing generational gains, and a pricing situation that makes the latest chips simply a poor value, a new AMD generation doesn't mean the same thing today as it did for the past seven years.

Maybe AMD is waiting for something better. Maybe until Zen 6, AMD will continue to deliver big generational leaps with a line of CPUs that can last for at least two years (AMD's usual release cycle). The company has described Zen 5 as the new foundation for its future CPUs, so that's not out of the question.

Until then, AMD is in a tough spot. The flagship Ryzen 9 9950X has to compete with last year's Core i9-14900K, which is not a good sign considering Intel's Arrow Lake CPUs are coming soon. And further down the stack, AMD's own last-gen options offer similar performance, sometimes even better gaming performance, and are much more affordable. Ryzen 9000 is a strange blip from a company that has had a nearly flawless record over the past seven years. Hopefully this is just a minor setback and not the new normal for Team Red.