AMD unveils Ryzen 5000 processors, including 'the world's best gaming CPU'
AMD has unveiled its Ryzen 5000 series processors for desktops, which are the first processors to feature its new Zen 3 architecture.
Included in the released is a chip -- the Ryzen 9 5950X -- that the company says is "the world's best gaming CPU."
None of this will be good news for AMD's beleaguered rival, Intel.
The new Ryzen 5000 silicon replaces the Ryzen 3000 released last year, and while the Zen 3 architecture still uses a 7-nanometer process like its predecessor, AMD has squeezed more performance out of the silicon -- higher clock speeds and up to 19 percent increase in instructions per cycle.
Taking all the improvements into account, AMD claim that users replacing an older Zen 2 CPU with a comparable new Zen 3 chip would see around a 26 percent performance boost.
And that's while keeping the core count, and, more importantly, TDP, the same.
All the new chips also use AMD's existing Socket AM4, making them perfect for those looking to upgrade, which seems to be a market that AMD is wooing.
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Here are the four chips:
Model | Cores/Threads | Boost/Base Freq (GHz) | Cache (MB) | TDP (Watts) | Price ($) |
Ryzen 9 5950X | 16/32 | Up to 4.9 / 3.4 | 72 | 105 | 799 |
Ryzen 9 5900X | 12/24 | Up to 4.8 / 3.7 | 70 | 105 | 549 |
Ryzen 7 5800X | 8/16 | Up to 4.7 / 3.8 | 36 | 105 | 449 |
Ryzen 5 5600X | 6/12 | Up to 4.6 / 3.7 | 35 | 65 | 299 |
All four processors will land November 5th.
Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that the processors are a little pricier than last year -- bumped up by $50 -- but even at these new prices, the Ryzen 5000 offers exceptional value for money.
As far as motherboard support goes, existing AMD 500 series motherboards can be made ready for Ryzen 5000 Series processors with an update.
The Ryzen 9 5950X is the powerhouse of this line, and AMD claims it offers 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, beating Intel's Core i9-10900K in benchmarks run on otherwise similarly specced machines.
But nothing stays still in the CPU world for long, and AMD will once again find itself under pressure from Intel when its Rocket Lake chips land Q1 2021.