AMD’s new Zen Three Ryzen desktop CPUs arrive November 5

Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, is holding up a Zen 3 CPU at today's AMD gaming event – most likely a Ryzen 9 5900X or a Ryzen 9 5950X.

AMD

At today's AMD Gaming Event 2020, Team Red announced its next big thing in desktop CPUs – the Ryzen 5xxx series powered by Zen 3. The event was short – just half an hour from start to finish – and AMD announced record-breaking internal benchmark results.

Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, Mark Papermaster, CTO, and Robert Hallock, Director of Technical Marketing, took turns praising the functionality of the new equipment. The trio paints a picture of more relentless pressure on rival Intel. According to AMD tests, raw performance, energy efficiency, IPC and single-threaded performance have all increased significantly compared to the currently leading desktop processors from AMD and Intel.

• Ryzen 9 5900X is a 12-core / 24-thread beast with a boost clock of almost 5 GHz, but it still fits into a relatively frugal 105 W TDP envelope.

  Jim Salter

• The gaming increase shown here is against the Ryzen 9 3900XT and a bit misleading – AMD's fastest desktop CPU is not the 3900XT, but the 3950X.

  Jim Salter

• Ryzen 9 5900X shows a smaller gaming increase over the i9-10900K – but still an increase.

  Jim Salter

• Shown here is the November 5900X beating the previous single-threaded performance king, Intel's 19-10900K.

  Jim Salter

According to CTO Mark Papermaster, Zen 3 – the architecture that next month's Ryzen lineup is based on – has been in development for over five years. Zen 3 has a new unified 8-core complex that allows each core in the cluster direct access to the L3 cache. Papermaster stated that the new architecture has a 19 percent increase in instructions per clock cycle (IPC) compared to Zen 2.

Marketing director Robert Hallock took the more direct approach, using charts created from in-house benchmarks to show how the Ryzen 9 5900X destroys both AMD and Intel CPUs. The diagrams show the Ryzen 9 5900X at 105 W TDP and offer an average gaming increase of 26 percent (measured in frames per second) compared to the Ryzen 9 3900XT.
Ryzen 9 5900X's gaming surge compared to Intel's 125W i9-10900K was much smaller, but still almost unanimous – Battlefield V posted a minus 3 percent loss for the 5900X, with each of the other 10 games gaining between 1 percent and 21 percent exhibited.

Finally, Hallock showed how the 5900X is taking away the single-threaded performance crown from Intel: The 5900X scores 631 points in the single-threaded Cinebench R20, a significant increase over the 549 score of the i9-10900K.

For those who really care about thermals and performance, we should also note that a head-to-head comparison of the i9-10900K's 125W TDP to AMD's 105W TDP can be quite misleading. Although the difference between the stated TDP is only 20 percent, we have a 60 percent difference – 336 W versus 210 W – in the sustained power consumption on the wall between an i9-10900K system and a Ryzen 9 3900XT system during operation found Cinebench R20 benchmarks. We also noticed 30 percent lower power consumption when the desktop was idle, even though the Ryzen system has a discrete RTX 2060 GPU and the Intel system only runs on an internal GPU.

• AMD saves the best for last – the 5900X beats the i9-10900K across the board, and the 16c / 32t 5950X does the same with the 5900X.

  Jim Salter

• All previously announced desktop CPUs of the Ryzen 5000 series offer SMT with parts in 6c / 12t, 8c / 16t and 12c / 24t. Ryzen 9 5950X (not shown) is a 16c / 32t part.

  Jim Salter

• The four announced SKUs will retail for $ 300, $ 450, $ 550, and $ 800.

  Jim Salter

After showing internal benchmarks of the 5900X, which had taken over all the remaining crowns from Intel competition – although Hallock ironically remarked, "We know you'll be waiting for benchmarks" – Su stepped back on stage. She announced that the 5900X isn't the high-end part in the new lineup. The $ 800 Ryzen 9 5950X offers more cores and threads and a higher boost clock than the $ 550 5900X with the same 105W TDP.

• The 5950X is directly compared to the 3950X – its introduction here explains why the 5900X was only compared to the 3900XT.

  Jim Salter

• If anyone has any questions about whether Zen 3 beats the fastest Zen 2 CPUs, this slide will be answered.

  Jim Salter

• Su nicknamed the Radeon RX6000 series "Big Navi", but with far fewer details than it gave for Ryzen 5000.

  Jim Salter

The introduction of the 5950X late in the presentation explains why AMD compared the 5900X to the 3900XT and not to the fastest desktop CPU of the previous generation – this award was reserved for the 5950X, the 3950X and the Intel i9- 10900K equally dominates.

The Ryzen 9 5900X couldn't hold its single-threaded performance crown for long either – AMD says the 5950X pulled a Cinebench R20 1T of 640, a little higher than the 5900X's already record-breaking 631.

Su also briefly teased a Radeon 6000 series GPU with the affectionate nickname "Big Navi" as well as short clips from over 60 FPS 4K triple-A games. The new GPU doesn't have a release date or official specifications yet.

According to AMD, Ryzen 5000 CPUs will be shipped to OEM partners today and will be available worldwide starting November 5th.