AMD Clarifies Ryzen 7000 “Zen 4” TDP and Power Limits: 170W TDP, 230W PPT

The mention of “170 W” in one of the slides of AMD’s Computex 2022 reveal of the upcoming Ryzen 7000 “Zen 4” desktop processors, caused quite some confusion as to what that figure meant. AMD issued a structured clarification on the matter, laying to rest the terminology associated with it. Apparently, there will be certain SKUs of Socket AM5 processors with TDP of 170 W. This would be the same classical definition of TDP that AMD has been consistently using. The package-power tracking (PPT), a figure that translates as power limit for the socket, is 230 W.

This does not necessarily mean that there will be a Ryzen 7000-series SKU with 170 W TDP. AMD plans to give AM5 a similar life-cycle to AM4, which is now spanning five generations of Ryzen processors, and the 170 W TDP and 230 W PPT figures only denote design goals for the socket. AMD, in a statement, explained why it needed to make AM5 capable of delivering much higher power than AM4 could—to enable higher CPU core-counts in the future, more on-package hardware, and for new capabilities like power-hungry instruction-sets (think AVX-512). AMD has been calculating PPT as 1.35 times TDP, since the very first generation of Ryzen chips. For a 105 W TDP processor, this means 140 W PPT, and the same formula continues with Ryzen 7000 series (230 W is 1.35x 170 W).

The AMD statement follows.

As you may have seen there has been a lot of discussion recently on TDP/PPT stemming from our keynote at Computex (and the conflicting details that were shared during some of the pre-briefs mentioning 170 W was the PPT). Our press release and keynote slides were indeed correct about the power specs of the AM5 socket – The TDP is 170 W; The PPT is thus 230 W. Our official statement is below:

“AMD would like to issue a correction to the socket power and TDP limits of the upcoming AMD Socket AM5. AMD Socket AM5 supports up to a 170 W TDP with a PPT up to 230 W. TDP*1.35 is the standard calculation for TDP v. PPT for AMD sockets in the “Zen” era, and the new 170 W TDP group is no exception (170*1.35=229.5).

This new TDP group will enable considerably more compute performance for high core count CPUs in heavy compute workloads, which will sit alongside the 65 W and 105 W TDP groups that Ryzen is known for today. AMD takes great pride in providing the enthusiast community with transparent and forthright product capabilities, and we want to take this opportunity to apologize for our error and any subsequent confusion we may have caused on this topic.”