It's official: AMD has announced pricing for its new Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 CPUs. And believe it or not, it is actually cheaper than the current Ryzen 7000 series family.

More precisely, it is cheaper than the Ryzen 7000 launch price two years ago. Most Ryzen 7000 models are available for considerably less than the 2022 launch price.

In other words, model by model, a new Ryzen 9000 CPU will cost more than the price at which the previous Ryzen 7000 model is currently available. But in a world where GPU prices seem to rise exponentially with each new generation, this must be good news.

This means that the new chips will be priced between $20 and $50 less than the original price of the Ryzen 7000 series. Inevitably, it is the high-end chips that will receive the larger discounts.

Of course, as noted above, the current price of each Ryzen 7000 model has dropped since its launch. Currently, the Ryzen 5 7600X is about $200, the Ryzen 7 7700X is $295, the Ryzen 9 7900X is $360, and the Ryzen 9 7950X is $525.

In other words, the new chips are considerably more expensive than the current prices of the 7000 series. However, the trend line is in the right direction, as Ryzen 9000 prices are likely to come down over time.

Still, we won't have to wait too long to find out what we can expect to get from AMD's latest CPU designs. Stay tuned for a full review of the new chips, which we will bring you shortly.

Highlights include the aforementioned Zen 5 architecture, with an average 16% increase in IPC (instructions processed) per clock cycle. The number of cores remains the same, but the clock speeds have increased slightly on some models.

We are not expecting a performance revolution with these new chips, but they should be visibly faster; AMD claims performance gains of up to 23% in some metrics. However, we will make that determination in a future review. Stay tuned.