Yesterday morning, AMD had a presentation announcing the highly anticipated Ryzen 5000 series CPUs. They revealed their new Zen 3 architecture, and touted the increase in gaming performance in this new line. The keynote was titled “Where Gaming Begins” and that was clearly the focus of this interesting announcement.
AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su started the show with an emphasis on AMDs gaming capability. The PS5, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S all feature AMD cpus. The next generation of consoles is powered by AMD. However, these console CPUs were a footnote. Dr. Su quickly turned her focus to the new desktop processors.
Zen 3 Core Architecture
Since the initial release of the Ryzen line in 2017, AMD has made efforts to improve their gaming platform. They acknowledge that they didn’t create the best gaming processor right out of the gate. It took several years of iteration before the 3rd generation Ryzen CPUs really reset expectations on price to performance.
The new CPU core is called Zen 3. AMD claims that these processors now deliver the best single core performance on the market. It’s clear that this was a major focus for the development teams. In gaming, Intel has long been considered the better CPU option, because games rely more on strong single cores. The Ryzen 3000 previously offered a great value for the cores and threads for the price, but critics tended to focus on single thread performance as compared to similar Intel CPUs.
Zen 3 is “a front to back redesign” of their existing Zen platform. The Zen 2 layout was segmented into two sections, in an eight core each with four cores and a 16 MB L3 Cache. In the redesigned Zen 3, all of those eight cores share one large 32 MB L3 Cache, which is where the increased performance in gaming comes from.
Ryzen 9 5900X
The AMD Ryzen 9 5900X is the first GPU of the lineup to be announced, and it’s the top of the line model, built to compete with the Intel Core i9-10900K. It is a 12 core, 24 thread processor with a max boost of 4.8GHz. The processor has a draw of 105 W, keeping the same level of power efficiency as the previous series.
To demonstrate the difference between the new 5000 series and the previous 3000 series, AMD showed off a benchmark test in Shadow of the Tomb Raider as compared to the previous generation’s Ryzen 9 3900XT, both processors have the same core counts.
The new Ryzen 9 3900 XT boasted a 28% performance increase over the previous series on the same hardware. AMD then showed off the new processor’s performance over a variety of games as compared to the previous generation’s Ryzen 9 3900XT.
Below are the figures from the chart AMD displayed:
- League of Legends +50%
- PUBG +30%
- DOTA 2 +24%
- F1 2019 +24%
- Battlefield V +5%
- Total War Three Kingdoms +6%
- CS:GO +46%
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider + 28%
- Far Cry New Dawn +22%
- Ashes of the Singularity +19%
1920×1080 Resolution
From these figures, the Ryzen 9 5900X appears to have substantial gains in performance over the previous 3000 series processor with an average total performance gain of 26%.
In order to demonstrate the strength of the single core performance on the Ryzen 9 5900X, AMD showed off a single core Cinebench test, compared to the Intel Core i9-10900K. The 5900X is the first processor to break a score of 600 on this test, scoring 613. The i9-10900K scored 544.
Performance Verses Intel
In a head to head matchup against the i9-10900K, the Ryzen 9 5900X shows mostly marginal performance increases. However, when comparing these two CPUs, it’s also important to factor in the price differences, and for $100 less, the slightly higher performance of the 5900X seems much more impressive.
5000 Series Lineup
Dr. Su returned to the stage to announce the rest of the launch day 5000 series lineup. The Ryzen 9 5900X was listed at the top, with it’s 12 cores and 24 threads, 3.7GHz base clock speed, 4.8 GHz max boost, with a 105W TDP; priced at $549.
The Ryzen 7 5800X features 8 cores, 16 threads, a 3.8 GHz base clock speed, a 4.7 GHz max boost, with a 105W TDP; priced at $449.
The Ryzen 5 5600X is a 6-Core 12-Thread processor with a 3.7 GHz base clock speed, a 4.6 GHz max boost, with a 65W TDP; priced at $299.
Ryzen 9 5950X
However, there is an even higher end Ryzen 9, the Ryzen 9 5950X. The tagline for the 5950X is “the best for gamers meets the best for creators”. This processor boasts 16 cores, 32 threads, up to a 4.9GHz boost, and only draws 105W. This processor breaks the Cinebench record that was set by the Ryzen 9 5900X earlier.
Compared to the Intel Core i9-10900K in content creation and gaming, the Ryzen 5950X showed some significant increases over the competition. Though, bear in mind that the 5950X is a 16 core processor being compared to the 10 core Intel.
The Ryzen 5950X is priced at $799. It will be available November 5th, along with the rest of the announced 5000 series.
RX 6000 Series GPUs
To wrap up the presentation, AMD teased the announcement of their next generation Radeon GPUs. Nicknamed “Big Navi” by the public, AMD promises the 6000 series Radeon graphics cards are their best yet. They didn’t provide many technical details about the graphics cards, however they did show it off.
AMD will reveal more details about their RX 6000 GPUs on October 28th.
Wrap Up
Overall, if AMD can deliver on the performance promises of the new Zen 3 CPUs, these processors should become must haves for anyone looking to get max performance out of their systems.