In the Q&A session, after the announcement of the Zen5 and Ryzen9000 series, AMD was baked into everything: AI, data center, and mobile. One question from Paul Alcorn, 1 of Tom's Hardware's colleagues, pointed out that the top-end desktop ryzen processor has been powered by up to 5 cores for almost 16 years, and asked AMD if it would be enough for the gaming enthusiast PC market. CEO Dr. Lisa Su responded that you can add cores, but game developers don't routinely use that many cores in their software.

Specifically, she said, "For games, developers don't necessarily use all the cores sometimes."..There is no physical reason for not being able to do more than 16 cores...The key is just making sure that the person in the software is making use of it and doing this at a pace that can take advantage of it."Of course, this is not surprising, because anyone who is a PC game enthusiast knows that the game reacts much more to higher clock speeds, more cache, and faster RAM than it has 8 or more cores and 16 threads. This is because PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S have 8-core Cpus, and 1 of them are always set aside for housework, so games designed to be multi-platform releases are rarely suitable for using 8 cores or more for the PC version.

However, the main reason is that the processing cycles of most games are very linear, and many of the sequences are not particularly suitable for parallel processing. There are certain things like pipeline state object caching (aka shader compilation), data decompression, BVH structures for ray tracing, and object physics, but these aspects rarely become bottlenecks in the overall performance of the game. The latest Core i9 14900K has 24 cores, the i7 14700K has 20 cores, and even the midrange Core i5 14600K packs quite a few with 14 cores. But Intel, unlike all desktop Ryzes, does not have core parity in chip design. That is, the 14900K has 8 P cores and 16 E cores, which are not the same as each other.

The latter is not a high clock, does not support multithreading, and has performance similar to core processors about six years ago in architecture. The threads generated by the game are mostly forced to run on faster and more capable P—cores, while the weaker E-cores are easier to handle, which is why AMD's best gaming CPU is the Ryzen7 7800X3D - with only 8 cores and 16 threads. Oh, and a small pile of L3 cache.

Some people may be disappointed to see that the newly announced Ryzen9 9950X is another 16-core chip. I am one of such people and use my main PC for gaming, rendering and coding. These last 2 aspects will gladly take as many cores as you like, and that's what I might be saying about the Core i7 14700KF—20 cores and 28 threads (unbalanced, performance

AMD has no physical reason not to be able to provide more than 16 cores to the desktop Ryzen chip). There are very good economic reasons for that. The decision to go down the chiplet route with Zen3 only made 2 chips: the CCD, including the core and cache, and the IOD, which connects the processor's Ccd to RAM, Ssd, graphics card, etc.

All Ryzen desktop CPUs are made from the same 2 chiplets, so they can cover every market. You can have an extensive portfolio of processors cheap and easy to use. If AMD wants to use Ryzen with more than 16 cores, it should either create a new IOD or use the same IOD used by Threadrippers and Epyc.

This is a larger chiplet, and given AMD's overwhelming demand for server chips, for example, the 24-core Ryzen doesn't have enough spare stock.

The Ryzen9 7950X is on sale for nearly5500 at the moment (and the new Ryzen9 9950X will be very popular when it arrives in stores on May 7). Given that the 16-co

factor it would be no better in the game than the 7800X3D and has none of the extra features that make Threadrippers so good for the Prosumer market, you might think that

The eight cores have been in the game for many years to come yet. It's going to be fine for you and we will get to the point where you absolutely need more than this

.