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The four non-3D Zen 5-based AMD Ryzen processors top our leaderboard when it comes to price per core.
Data collated at the beginning of March 2025 shows that the 9900X, the 9950X, the 9700X and the 9600X are the most competitive price wise.
The Ryzen 9900X is by far, the most balanced offer of the quartet, with a low TDP per core (just 10W), a high base speed (4.4GHz) and a very reasonable price at $387.75 (or $31.56/core) at the time of writing, almost a quarter cheaper than its suggested retail price.
This is the second of several articles based on data I’ve compiled on 41 AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 CPUs (socketed, OEM). In the rest of the series, I will be looking at the cost per core, performance per core, AMD CPUs that are getting more expensive, all this with the new Ryzen 9 9900/9950 X3D CPUs in the backdrop.
Not bad for a near-flagship CPU launched less than one year ago. The 9950X has a cost per core slightly higher, at $34.05, but is the fastest consumer CPU that AMD has to offer (until the launch of the 9950X3D).
The table of all the CPUs I have analyzed can be found at the end of this article. They have been sorted by cost per core. Some CPUs are not yet on sale at the time of writing.
A ‘value’ 192-core CPU?
At just over $10,000 from a reputable retailer (Wiredzone), the EYPC 9965 is AMD’s most expensive CPU ever launched and one that I covered extensively in a recent article.
It has 192 cores, which translates into a per-core cost of $52.26; far more than any consumer Ryzen CPUs but still a third of the cost of the most expensive AMD CPU (per core).
It delivers one of the lowest TDP per core (at just 2.6W) and the lowest TDP per GHz* (1.16W), thanks to its Zen 5c architecture, a more compact (but compatible) version of the Zen 5.
Its smaller sibling, the 96-core AMD EPYC 9655, has the largest discount I’ve seen across the 41 CPUs I’ve tracked, with a staggering 56.8% reduction from the sticker price.
It is a full Zen 5 part and as such gets a much higher TDP per core, twice the amount of cache and a faster base speed.
* Lowest TDP per GHz is calculated by taking the CPU TDP and dividng it by the number of cores x the base speed in GHz. It delivers a very rough composite efficiency metric.
The mystery of the ThreadRipper Pro 7945WX
At the other end of the spectrum, the EPYC 9175F is the most expensive AMD CPU per core costing of just under $160, that’s almost 5x that of the 9950X, which shares the same number of cores (16).
The reason why it is so expensive is that it has 32x more cache per core than an average consumer CPU (512MB) and cache is a very, very expensive commodity.
Other F-labelled EPYC CPUs trawl the bottom of my cost per core leaderboard; F stands for Fast and these CPUs are high frequency optimized parts with big cache memory.
One more thing. I’d like to draw your attention to the existence of the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7945WX.
It is the only AMD CPU from this list that you cannot buy as it is available exclusively in workstations from Lenovo, HP and Dell.
What makes it so special for me is its high TDP per core, the highest of all the CPUs I’ve analysed.
At 6.21W, this Zen 4 part is 5.5X more power hungry than the EPYC 9965 (or 3x that of the 9900X, a similar 12-core CPU).
Maybe that’s because it has the highest base speed of any CPU in the list (jointly with the 9800X3D) and is built on an older manufacturing technology.
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