AMD's Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs will start shipping on September 27th

AMD has officially announced the Ryzen 7000 processor models, which the company had accidentally revealed back in July. It will release four models on September 27th, to be specific, the most affordable of which is the 6-core Ryzen 5 7600X that will set you back $299, followed by the 8-core Ryzen 7700X that costs $100 more at $399. The 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X CPU will be sold for $549, while the 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X will cost $699. As Ars Technica notes, the 7600X and the 7900X models have the same launch prices as their direct predecessors from the Ryzen 5000 lineup, whereas the 7950X is $100 cheaper. The 7700X costs $100 more than the 5700X, but that model launched over a year after the first Ryzen 5000 processors came out.

The Ryzen 7000 models are based on AMD's Zen 4 architecture, which promises to deliver max boost speed above 5GHz, AI acceleration and a doubled L2 cache. They use AM5 platform, the chipmaker's new socket generation, and will require DDR5 RAM. They're also the first desktop CPUs based on the 5nm manufacturing process, according to Gizmodo, and that means they have more transistors than the 5000 chips. That usually translates to less heat and more power for users.

AMD claims that the Ryzen 7000 processors are around 29 percent faster than the Ryzen 5000 models for single-threaded tasks, including games. Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster told CNET, though, that when the company measured for tasks that span the processor's 16 processing cores, the speed boost was as much as 49 percent.

If you're looking for Zen 4 CPUs cheaper than these four, you'll have to wait until next year when the more affordable options and models for laptops are slated to arrive. The company intends to continue selling processors based on older Zen architectures that work with the AM4 platform, though,so you still have options if you're looking to build a PC on a budget.