AMD has taken the hood off of its Ryzen 5000 desktop CPU series with the new Zen 3 architecture. Launching on November 5th, the series consists of the Ryzen 9 5950X ($799), Ryzen 9 5900X ($549), Ryzen 7 5800X ($449) and Ryzen 5 5600X ($299). The company touts the Ryzen 9 5900X as the “world’s best gaming CPU” with 12 cores, 32 threads and a max boost speed of 4.8 GHz.
Meanwhile, the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X model boasts 16 cores with 32 threads and 4.9 GHz max boost speed. The Ryzen 7 5800X has eight cores and 16 threads with a max boost speed of 4.7GHz. The Ryzen 5 5600X rounds out the line-up with six cores, 12 threads and 4.6 GHz max boost speed.
Obviously, more than just the number of cores and threads, it’s the Zen 3 architecture that’s worth noting. The chip offers a 19 percent increase in instructions per cycle. Even better is that the Zen 3 CPUs can work with older motherboards (following a firmware update) and will offer a 26 percent improvement overall.
AMD still has more announcements in store, namely the Radeon RX 6000 “Big Navi” GPU series with RDNA 2, on October 28th. With Intel announcing its new Rocket Lake CPUs for release in Q1 2021 and Nvidia unveiling its affordable Nvidia RTX 30 GPU series, it’s going to be a very interesting period for PC gaming. Stay tuned for more details in the meantime.
