As far as I understood the Ryzen 9000 CPUs were also disappointing in actual benchmarks at about the same performance for gaming as last generation for a much higher price. I've gone for a good old 7800X3D in a recent build.
There was also a windows performance regression, the performance is in line with what AMD's IPC stats said it should be on Linux. Microsoft is working on a fix for it, but most YouTube channels haven't really covered it. Wendell from Level1Techs has a video about it. The 7800X3D will probably still outperform a 9950X in gaming, though, because the 3D V-cache is basically magic.
at much lower power consumption! Every time a new processor comes around, lots of people complain that they don't need faster but want less heat and less noise. Now they get it and still complain.
Yeah, if they'd messaged this release as a significant architecture change (that will be more significant over time, and in specific cases, like anything actually using a 512-bit data pipeline) and an efficiency gain they wouldn't be getting this reaction.
It's a much better release than many of the Intel refreshes, but the marketing leading up to it was quite bizarre compared to launch performance.
Moving the same performance down ~40w is great. Having better branch prediction, more registers, lower latency on many ops and double the SIMD width for no cost? Fantastic.
They sold it as a huge gaming gain that hasn't materialized, and then tried to say it was due to windows admin modes interfering with branch prediction (True, but equally seems to apply to Zen3/4)
If they'd sold this as a perf/W and backend architecture shift, they wouldn't be getting the reaction they're currently earning.
Not really, from what I understand they're now upselling lower core count processors if you look at for example 7700 vs 9700. If you compare 9700 vs 7600 it makes more sense and the power usage is more comparable. Another 'fix' proposed by AMD also was basically to enable PBO which would then result in a marginal performance improvement, but no longer at a lower power usage.
