Earlier today AMD’s CEO Lisa Su unveiled the company’s brand new Ryzen 5000 series of CPUs, based on their latest Zen 3 microarchitecture. The 25 minute YouTube premier, in which Su gave a nod to the company’s Zen hardware in the new Xbox and PlayStation consoles, finally shed light on four powerful new CPUs and their remarkable price points:
- AMD Ryzen 9 5950X: 16 core, 4.9GHz boost, 72 MB cache, 105W TDP, $799
- AMD Ryzen 9 5900X: 12 core, 4.8GHz boost, 70MB cache, 105W TDP, $549
- AMD Ryzen 7 5800X: 8 core, 4.7GHz boost, 36MB cache, 105W TDP, $449
- AMD Ryzen 5 5600X: 6 core, 4.6GHz boost, 35MB cache, 65W TDP, $299
While the numbers speak for themselves, Lisa made some very bold statements that the 5950X has “the highest single-thread performance of any desktop gaming processor” and the “most multi-core performance of any desktop gaming processor and any desktop processor in a mainstream CPU socket.”
Robert Hallock, AMD’s Director of Technical Marketing, gave gamers some excitement with a whopping 28% performance increase in Tomb Raider compared to last-gen’s 3900XT flagship. He paraded some huge numbers in League of Legends and CS:Go too, showcasing a 50% and 46% performance increase respectively. Robert then uncovered that the Ryzen 9 5900X (the 12-core, not the 16-core flagship) is the first-ever desktop processor to break a 600+ single-threaded score in Cinebench at 631 points, compared to Intel’s Core i9-10900K flagship which lags behind in the mid-500s.
Let’s do some quick math to see the how Ryzen 5000 series stack up to the previous-gen Ryzen 3000 series:
| Cores & Clocks | Combined Max GHz | With 19% IPC uplift | |
| Ryzen 5 5600X | 6 x 4.6 GHz | 27.6 GHz | 32.8 GHz |
| Ryzen 5 3600X | 6 x 4.4 GHz | 26.4 GHz | |
| Ryzen 7 5800X | 8 x 4.7 GHz | 37.6 GHz | 44.7 GHz |
| Ryzen 7 3800X | 8 x 4.5 GHz | 36 GHz | |
| Ryzen 9 5900X | 12 x 4.8 GHz | 57.6 GHz | 68.5 GHz |
| Ryzen 9 3900X | 12 x 4.6 GHz | 55.2 GHz |
*These figures are not 100% accurate; boost clocks cannot be maintained for extended periods over all cores, and we are only purposing the 19% IPC uplift calculation as indicated by AMD. Nonetheless, we’re amazed to see the 6-core budget chip almost matching the 8-core performance of last-gen.
AMD’s CTO Mark Papermaster gave us a detailed insight into the company’s Zen journey thus far, timelining the progression from the Zen microarchitecture in 2017 to the all-new Zen 3 launching on November 5th 2020. Mark explained that AMD’s strategy was for “absolute leadership in the x86 market” and was quick to note they beat Intel to market with a 7nm desktop processor. Intel’s stock price is on a slow and steady downward trajectory today following AMD’s announcement. Given that Intel are still peddling an upcycled 14nm Skylake-based CPU architecture in their flagship CPUs, should they be worried of their competitors’ new products?
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