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At Computex 2022, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Sui, her processor series Ryzen 7000 and the associated AM5 platform. But while AMD was discussing specific details about its new platform for Zen 4 and beyond, AMD inadvertently created a flurry of confusion around the AM5 platform by citing different performance numbers for different groups. Ultimately, AMD cited 170 watts at various points as both the highest nominal TDP supported by the platform and as a Power Package Tracking (PPT) rating, which is the absolute highest amount of power a chip can draw under load. It goes without saying that these two claims were not both intended to be correct and a correction was needed.
As first reported by the Tom’s Hardware crew, AMD has released a statement addressing the confusion and proving the correct values. In short, the 170 watt TDP was correct. The PPT value is now even 230 watts – which is typical for AMD’s Ryzen processors with a 1.35-fold TDP specification.
AMD’s full statement is below:
AMD would like to issue a correction to the socket power and TDP limits of the upcoming AMD Socket AM5. AMD Socket AM5 supports up to 170W TDP with a PPT of up to 230W. TDP*1.35 is the standard TDP vs. PPT calculation for AMD sockets in the “Zen” era, and the new 170W TDP group is no exception (170*1.35=229.5).This new TDP group will enable significantly more processing power for high-core-count CPUs running heavy workloads alongside the 65W and 105W TDP groups Ryzen is known for today. AMD takes great pride in providing transparent and honest product features to the enthusiast community and we would like to take this opportunity to apologize for our error and the resulting confusion we may have caused on this topic.
The overall increase in performance specs for the AM5 platform wasn’t unexpected – part of the benefit of moving to LGA sockets is extra pins for power – but this eventually settles the question of how much performance AMD’s new socket and platform are designed to deliver. Motherboard vendors will no doubt go (well) beyond that on their high-end boards, but 170W/230W will be the baseline for any motherboard that wants to officially support high-end AM5 chips.
CPU power consumption has increased in recent years as we are now well into the Dark Silicon era. While a single CPU core still only draws a modest amount of power — on the order of 20W to 30W for a high-performance core — the total power requirements for high-end processors with more than 16 cores are increasing rapidly. As a result, performance limits are typically the limiting factor for heavily multi-threaded workloads, as CPUs must drop in clock speeds to stay within their performance limits. In turn, increasing the performance limits of the platform provides more headroom to keep more cores clocked higher, more often.
However, it should be noted that AMD’s clarifications today apply to the AM5 socket, not the first Ryzen 7000-series chips that will use it. AMD doesn’t necessarily have to tap into the full TDP of the socket right away – but there are good reasons for this for the MT performance reasons mentioned above. So officially we still don’t know what the TDPs of the high-end Ryzen 7000 processors will be; but unofficially it wouldn’t be surprising if the top chips approached 170 watts.
Finally, it seems that we should expect the Ryzen 7000 family to hit that full TDP right from the start. According to a comment by an AMD spokesperson on Reddit, the top TDP of the Ryzen 7000 series will actually be 170 watts, with PPTs hitting 230 watts.
