Dr Lisa. Su, AMD CEO has announced the next generation of the company’s mainstream Ryzen processor.  The 5000 series is getting launched with 4 processors out of the gate, promising 19% raw increase in performance-per-clock, well above recent generational improvements.

 

AMD Ryzen 5000 Series Processors Zen 3 Microarchitecture
Processor	Cores Threads	Base Freq	Turbo Freq	L3 Cache	TDP	MSRP
Ryzen 9 5950X	16c/32t	3400	4900	64 MB	105 W	$799
Ryzen 9 5900X	12c/24t	3700	4800	64 MB	105 W	$549
Ryzen 7 5800X	8c/16t	3800	4700	32 MB	105 W	$449
Ryzen 5 5600X	6c/12t	3700	4600	32 MB	65 W	$299*

As you can see, AMD will no longer be providing a CPU cooler for chips above 65W TDP – citing that in its research that customers who buy the higher power processors almost always prefer to use their own cooler to eke out more performance when at full load.  Which is true in a sense, while serviceable at idle or regular load, at full tilt you’d want a bigger cooler than what AMD provides out of the box.

 

At face value, a 19% increase in performance in the same process node is impressive (even more impressive than Zen+ to Zen 2 improvements) but we need to wait for third party benchmarks to validate these claims.

CineBench R20 Single Thread Score
Processor	uArch	Process	1C Turbo	Score
Intel Core i7-1185G7	Tiger Lake	Intel 10nm SuperFin	4.8 GHz	595pts
Intel Core i9-10900K	Comet Lake	Intel 14+++	5.3 GHz	538pts
AMD Ryzen 9 3950X	Zen2	TSMC 7nm	4.7 GHz	536pts
AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT	Zen2	TSMC 7nm	4.7 GHz	523pts
AMD Ryzen 9 5900X	Zen3	TSMC 7nm	4.8 GHz	631pts

As teased by AMD, the single core performance of it’s top end 5900X chip is the highest so far in main stream class processors.  Again, something we need to wait others to validate.

One of the biggest improvements that AMD is touting is the merger of the previous 4 core CCX into an 8 core one.  This means less tinkering with apps that only work with one numa node, less latency when accessing the L3 cache and power savings.

This means that under most work load, we should see performance improvements across the board with the only downside the new pricing on these chips.

For upgraders, the 5000 series will be compatible with 500 series chipset motherboards at launch with compatibility being added to older chips via firmware updates

The new Zen 3 processors will hit the market globally  on November 5th so make sure your wallet is ready.