After weeks of speculation, AMD has finally unveiled the latest chip in its Zen 5 family: the Ryzen 5 9500F. The only catch is that it's a China-exclusive launch (at least for now), which makes sense considering the Ryzen 5 7500F also debuted in China first, before arriving in markets outside of China.
As expected, the Ryzen 5 9500F has a 6-core, 12-thread processor built on Granite Ridge silicon. It has a 5 GHz boost clock, up from a 3.8 GHz base clock. There's also 32 MB of L3 cache on board, along with a 65W TDP — the same as the higher-spec'd Ryzen 5 9600 and 9600X.
Speaking of the 7500F, the new 9500F is seemingly at least 7% faster than its predecessor, and up to 24% faster in certain CPU-intensive games. AMD's own benchmarks put the 9500F around 15% ahead of the 7500F on average, which is a very respectable gen-on-gen uplift. While the chipmaker did not publish any productivity claims, these numbers largely align with last week's Geekbench leak, where the 9500F was stacked quite closely to the 9600 and 9600X, despite having lower clock speeds.
As the name suggests, the 9500F lacks integrated graphics, as it does not contain the RDNA2 cores found in other Zen 5 chips. AMD started including iGPUs in their mainstream desktop CPU lineup since the Ryzen 7000 series, and the "F" variant represents essentially their best value. By ditching said graphics and cutting down on some specs, you get a better deal. Unfortunately, that's not the case here as the 9500F is priced at 1,299 Yuan (roughly $180), which is around the same as both the 9600 and 9600X, so they automatically render this inferior.
However, when it launches worldwide, AMD could introduce a lower price that's more in line with their actual listed prices for other, current-gen Ryzen CPUs. For context, the 7500F officially launched at just $175, which is a much more sensible price. However, even then, these chips are often discounted during sales. In contrast, the 9500F was listed for $217 on ShopBLT momentarily before being removed. Regardless of availability, the 9500F appears to be a solid upgrade on paper, and it's almost guaranteed to be a hit, just like its predecessor, if priced right.
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