The Ryzen 9 9950X is a very, very powerful desktop CPU of the Granite Ridge product family that features 16 Zen 5 cores (32 threads), PCIe 5 support and a basic iGPU. The Ryzen was launched in June 2024, with sales slated to start in August.
The 9950X shares some of the specifications with the mighty Zen 4-powered Ryzen 9 7950X, including (but not limited to) the 16 MB L2 cache, the 64 MB L3 cache, the 5.7 GHz top clock speed and the 170 W long-term TDP.
Architecture and Features
Just like Strix Point APUs, Granite Ridge processors make use of the new Zen 5 microarchitecture. However, there are no efficient cores here; all of 9950X's cores are full Zen 5 cores. Furthermore, Granite Ridge is a multi-die design with only the CPU cores produced using a fairly modern 4 nm TSMC process. Strix Point processors are a single-die design, from what we know.
According to AMD, Zen 5 delivers a 16% IPC improvement over Zen 4 thanks to branch prediction improvements and other refinements.
Elsewhere, the 9950X has an impressive 64 MB of L3 cache and 24 direct PCIe 5 lanes (3.93 GB/s throughput per lane) with up to 12 additional PCIe 4 lanes available depending on the motherboard. It supports DDR5 RAM as fast as 5,600 MT/s (up to 8,000 MT/s if overclocked).
The 9950X is unlocked for overclocking. Naturally, the AM5 socket CPU supports Windows 11, 64-bit Windows 10 as well as many Linux distros.
Performance
According to early July leaks, its multi-thread performance is about as good as that of the 24-core Core i9-14900K Intel CPU. We'll definitely update this section once we get our hands on a system powered by the 9950X.
Graphics
The Radeon 610M comes equipped with just 128 unified shaders running at up to 2,200 MHz. Its gaming performance is slated to be extremely low and only just sufficient for pre-2020 games in resolutions such as 1024x768.
Power consumption
The CPU cores are built with TSMC's N4P process for good, as of mid 2024, power efficiency. (Apple is the leader in this regard with the second-generation 3 nm process.)
The Ryzen 9's long-term TDP is 170 W. It'll probably consume up to 250 W when under heavy short-term loads. If overclocked, the power consumption figures will increase significantly.
The AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX is a high-end notebook processor from the Fire Range series with 16 cores and hyperthreading (SMT), which means it can process up to 32 threads simultaneously. Unlike the Ryzen 9 9955HX3D, the chip does not offer a 3D V-Cache. The chip was presented at CES in early 2025 and is intended for fast and expensive gaming laptops.
Thanks to the high-clocked 16 Zen 5 cores, the performance of the CPU should be excellent and only be outperformed by the 9955HX3D thanks to the 3D V-Cache. Together with the Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX at the top of the mobile CPUs.
The 9955HX is intended for large and heavy gaming notebooks and is therefore configurable from 55-75 watts TDP (default 55 watts). The SoC is manufactured in the modern 4nm FinFET process at TSMC (both compute dies, I/O die in 6nm) and should therefore have very good energy efficiency.
- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card - Average benchmark values for this graphics card * Smaller numbers mean a higher performance 1 This benchmark is not used for the average calculation
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