This morning in the wee small hours for us Australians, gamers (some I know staying up until 3am to watch live) watched one of the more anticipated events of the tech year.
The launch of the next generation of AMD Ryzen CPU chips.
Hours before YouTube stream even started, the chat was buzzing with gamers waiting for Dr. Lisa Su, President and CEO of AMD, to take the stage.
When Dr. Su did walk out, the stage full of lights cutting through smoke, it’s an event that would have been drowned in oohs, ahhs and eruptuous cheers as announcements were made if not for COVID-19. Dr. Su has rapidly become the gaming community’s Steve Jobs, building all the excitement and deliving a great presentation, right down to the “one last thing.”
For 50 years AMD has driven innovation in high-performance computing, graphics and visualization technologies ― the building blocks for gaming, immersive platforms and the data center. Hundreds of millions of consumers, leading Fortune 500 businesses and cutting-edge scientific research facilities around the world rely on AMD technology daily to improve how they live, work and play. AMD employees around the world are focused on building great products that push the boundaries of what is possible.
AMD is, excitingly, constantly innovating and not only catching up but overtaking the competition by storm.
At this point, as AMD are saying, this is Where Gaming Begins…
What Happened At The Event?
AMD announced the AMD Ryzen™ 5000 Series desktop processor line-up powered by the new “Zen 3” architecture, expected to be available globally on November 5, 2020. The fastest desktop processors in the game, Ryzen 5000 Series desktop processors deliver a 26% generational uplift in gaming performance while extending the dominance of Ryzen in multi-core performance and power efficiency.
Finally, AMD also provided a sneak peek at the competitive performance of the forthcoming AMD Radeon™ RX 6000 series graphics cards. Dr. Su demonstrated Borderlands 3 running on the Ryzen 5900X processor and Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics card – delivering 61 frames-per-second in 4K resolution with beautiful image quality, alongside other previews.
My Highlight
The announcement of the upcoming AMD Ryzen 9
5900X has me pumped.
Sporting 12 cores, 24 threads, with a base frequency of 3.6Ghz and boost of up to 4.8Ghz, utilising a 70mb shared cache, it’s an impressive piece of kit remaining at only 105W.
Honestly, this chip is a beast!
As expected, it out performing it’s previous equivilent counterpart, the 3900XT, by up to 50% performance in some games at 1920×1080 resolution.
But the real telling point was when they ran benchmark tests against Intel’s Core i9-10900K CPU, which is the top of the range that Intel currently offer. It not only outperformed but, in my opinion, it stomped the competition. With the Intel chip receiving a score of 544, the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X clocked in at 631.
While the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X is pretty and has even more impressive stats, with my upcoming upgrade to my gaming rig as soon as I can, I’m eyeing off the 5900X chip as the sweet spot. When this hits the Australian shores come November 5 2020, it should come in at AROUND AU$785 (by my calculations), which is about the price of the original AMD Ryzen 9 3900X with Wraith Prism cooler.
It’s worth noting, fans, that the top three CPU chips don’t come with coolers. So time to look at a nice AIO cooler to go with, perhaps.
The Official Stuff
— AMD Ryzen™ 5000 Series Desktop Processors built on new “Zen 3” core architecture deliver across-the board leadership performance for gamers and content creators —
October 9, 2020 – Today, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) introduced the highly anticipated AMD Ryzen 5000 Series desktop processor lineup powered by the new “Zen 3” architecture. Offering up to 16 cores, 32 threads and 72 MB of cache in the top-of-the-line AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, AMD Ryzen 5000 series processors dominate in heavily threaded workloads and power efficiency, while the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X processor offers up to a 26% generational uplift in gaming performance. With extensive improvements throughout the core including a unified 8-core complex with direct access to 32MB L3 cache, the new AMD “Zen 3” core architecture delivers a 19% generational increase in instructions per cycle (IPC), the largest since the introduction of “Zen” processors in 2017.
“Our commitment with each generation of our Ryzen processors has been to build the best PC processors in the world. The new AMD Ryzen 5000 Series Desktop Processors extend our leadership from IPC4, power efficiency to single-core, multi-core performance and gaming,” said Saeid Moshkelani, senior vice president and general manager, client business unit, AMD. “Today, we are extremely proud to deliver what our community and customers have come to expect from Ryzen processors – dominant multi-core and single-core performance and true gaming leadership – all within a broad ecosystem of motherboards and chipsets that are drop-in ready for AMD Ryzen 5000 Series Desktop Processors.”
AMD Ryzen 5000 Series Desktop Processors
Featuring a remarkable 19% IPC increase4 over the prior generation in PC workloads, the “Zen 3” architecture pushes gaming and content creation performance leadership, to a new level. “Zen 3” architecture reduces latency from accelerated core and cache communication and doubles the directly accessible L3 cache per core while delivering up to 2.8X more performance-per-watt versus the competition.
The top of the line 16 core AMD Ryzen 9 5950X offers:
— The highest single-thread performance of any desktop gaming processors5
— The most multi-core performance of any desktop gaming processor and any desktop processor in a mainstream CPU socket
The 12 core AMD Ryzen 9 5900X offers the best gaming experience by:
— Average of 7% faster in 1080p gaming across select game titles than the competition
— Average of 26% faster in 1080p gaming across select titles generationally
AMD Ryzen 5000 Series Desktop Processor Line-up and Availability
AMD 500 series motherboards are ready for AMD Ryzen 5000 Series desktop processors with a simple BIOS update. This broad ecosystem support and readiness includes over 100 AMD 500 series motherboards from all major motherboard manufacturers. AMD Ryzen 5000 Series desktop processors announced today are expected to be available for purchase globally on November 5, 2020.
AMD Ryzen Equipped to Win Game Bundle
The AMD Ryzen Equipped to Win game bundle program is back with the highly anticipated next chapter in the Far Cry® series, Far Cry® 6. Customers who purchase an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, or AMD Ryzen 7 5800X processor between November 5th, 2020 and December 31st, 2020 will receive a complimentary copy of Far Cry® 6 Standard Edition – PC digital when released. Additionally, customers who purchase an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X, AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT, or AMD Ryzen 7 3800XT processor between October 20th, 2020 and December 31st, 2020 will also receive a free copy of Far Cry® 6 Standard Edition – PC digital.
