AMD Reveals Ryzen 5000 Series, The "World's Best Gaming CPU"

AMD has officially revealed its slate of Zen 3-powered desktop CPUs, skipping the 4000 series and jumping right into the new Ryzen 5000 series. The company revealed 4 new CPUs in total, boasting that the Ryzen 5900 is now the "world's best gaming CPU."

The big difference with the new Zen 3 architecture is the increase in instructions per cycle, letting CPUs with the same core frequencies and core counts perform a lot better. Compared to Zen 2, which powers the current Ryzen 3000 series, Zen 3 achieves 19% more IPC, converting to an average of nearly 26% more performance in gaming alone when moving to the Ryzen 5000 series.

The jump between generations alone is massive, but it's Intel's gaming crown that AMD really aimed for during the presentation. The flagship of the Ryzen 5000 series, the Ryzen 3950X, doesn’t match the Intel Core i9-10900K in sheer single-core speed (4.9Ghz vs. Intel's peak of 5.3GHz), but AMD's own benchmarks in a suite of games show the Ryzen inching ahead in most scenarios where the CPU is the bottleneck. Those results will need to be verified in real-world use, but if they hold, it's a big blow to Intel which only has new CPUs launching early in 2021.

One area where the Ryzen 5000 series won't be competing with Intel is price. AMD isn't aiming to be the best CPUs on the market and undercut the competition, with prices across the board matching those of Intel counterparts. The entire Ryzen 5000 range is $50 more for like-for-like upgrades, but just like before, AMD is promising backwards compatibility with motherboards via a firmware update. That means you can slot your new Zen 3 CPU into your system without having to replace anything else, making the price increase a little easier to stomach.

The upcoming next-generation consoles are both making use of AMD's Zen technology, as well. The Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S use a custom Zen 2 CPU, as does the PS5. Of the three systems, the Xbox Series X's CPU is running at the highest GHz, with the other two not far behind.

The full specifications for the Ryzen 5000 range can be seen below. All four chips launch on November 5.

AMD Ryzen 9 5950X - $799

• Cores/ Threads: 16/32
• TDP: 105W
• Boost/ Base Frequencies: 4.9GHz/ 3.4GHz
• Cache: 72MB

AMD Ryzen 9 5900X - $549

• Cores/ Threads: 12/24
• TDP: 105W
• Boost/ Base Frequencies: 4.8GHz/ 3.7GHz
• Cache: 70MB

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X - $449

• Cores/ Threads: 8/16
• TDP: 105W
• Boost/ Base Frequencies: 4.7GHz/ 3.8GHz
• Cache: 36MB

AMD Ryzen 5 5600X - $299

• Cores/ Threads: 6/12
• TDP: 65W
• Boost/ Base Frequencies: 4.6GHz/ 3.7GHz
• Cache: 35MB