AMD’s new Zen 3 Ryzen Desktop CPUs arrive on November 5th

At today’s AMD Gaming 2020 event, Team Red announced the next big thing in desktop CPUs – the Ryzen 5xxx series powered by Zen 3. The event was short – only half an hour from start to finish – with AMD announcing benchmark internal benchmark scores .

AMD CEO Lisa Su, Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster, and Technical Marketing Director Robert Hallock took turns glorifying the new equipment’s features. The trio paints a picture of relentless pressure on rival Intel. According to AMD testing, raw performance, power efficiency, IPC, and single-thread performance have increased significantly compared to current flagship desktop processors from AMD and Intel.

According to CTO Mark Papermaster, Zen 3 – adopting the design of the Ryzen lineup next month – has been in development for more than five years. Zen 3 features a new unified 8-core stacker that allows each core in the cluster to have direct access to the L3 cache. Papermaster announced that the new build sees 19 percent instruction per hour cycle (IPC) when compared to the Zen 2.

Marketing Director Robert Hallock took a more direct approach, using the graphs generated from the company benchmarks to show the Ryzen 9 5900X demolishing both AMD and Intel CPUs. The graphics show the Ryzen 9 5900X, at 105W TDP, providing a gaming boost of 26 percent (as measured in frames per second) compared to the Ryzen 9 3900XT. Ryzen 9 5900X gaming upgrade compared to Intel’s 125W i9-10900 KB It was much smaller but still almost unanimous – Battlefield V showed a 3 percent loss for the 5900X, with each of the other ten games showing wins ranging from 1 percent to 21 percent.

Finally, Hallock showed that the 5900X takes the single-thread performance crown away from Intel: 5900X scores 631 on the single-threaded Cinebench R20, a big boost from the i9-10900K score of 544.

For those who really care about heat and power, we should also note that a direct comparison of the i9-10900K’s 125W TDP with AMD’s 105W TDPs can be very misleading. Although the difference between the aforementioned TDP is only 20 percent, we saw a 60 percent difference – 336W versus 210W – in the continuous full system power draw on the wall between the i9-10900K and the Ryzen 9 3900XT while operating the Cinebench R20 benchmarks. We’ve also seen a 30 percent lower desktop idle power pull, although the Ryzen system has a separate RTX 2060 GPU and an Intel system that runs on the internal GPU only.

After showcasing the internal benchmarks of the 5900X taking every remaining crown out of Intel’s competition – although, as Hallock sarcastically notes, “We know you’ll wait for the benchmarks” – the Su is on the stage once again. She announced that the 5900X is not the highest in the new lineup. The $ 800 Ryzen 9 5950X offers more cores, threads, and a boost hour over the $ 550 5900X while keeping the same 105W TDP.

The 5950X’s late rendering finally explains why AMD is comparing the 5900X to the 3900XT, and not with the previous generation’s fastest desktop CPU – because that honor was for the 5950X, which dominates the 3950X and Intel’s i9-10900K alike.

The Ryzen 9 5900X hasn’t managed to hold the single-threaded performance crown for long either – AMD says the 5950X pulled the Cinebench R20 1T out of the 640, slightly higher than the 5900X that already broke the 631 record.

Sue also briefly teased the Radeon 6000 series GPU, affectionately nicknamed “Big Navi”, along with short clips of 60+ FPS 4K triple-A games. The new GPU has no official release date or specifications.

AMD says Ryzen 5000 CPUs are shipped to OEM partners today and will be available globally from November 5th.