Oh my, it's time for another thoughts post that features brand new tech!
Introduction (and AMD's finances)
As you may or may not know, AMD has been doing great in the last couple of years. While their initial Ryzen launch, followed by their 2nd Gen Ryzen launch wasn't as popular as their 3rd Gen (Zen 2) launch, they did have a great impact on AMD.
As you can see, literally a few months after the 3rd Gen Ryzen was launched in July 2019, AMD stocks had begun shooting up towards the moon. In an industry where Intel had prevailed for years, AMD has been doing great in the last couple of years. It's actually funny to see that their stocks are, at last, worth more than Intel's stocks. (Intel stocks' currently at about 53 USD) and it's only going up.
But of course, while I wanted to mention about the stocks and AMD's victory over Intel financially, I would also like to mention their new announcement today, which could impact their stock prices even more, positively.
RYZEN 5000 SERIES
In their announcement video today, which was honestly, kinda weird. Due to the fact that Coronavirus/COVID-19 had hit them as well, it was a pre-recorded event with weird skips every now and then, probably trying to compensate for the awkwardness the hosts had considering there was probably no one in the audience.
Today, AMD announced four new CPUs, namely Ryzen 5 5600X, Ryzen 7 5800X , Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5950X all of these CPUs are very, very powerful.
Dr. Lisa Su and her team detailed the gains, showing at least 19% IPC (instructions per cycle) gain over the last gen CPUs. That's crazy! We're not talking about first Ryzen CPU here, we're talking about Zen 2! The series of CPUs that already had a great performance!
The changes that brought this important upgrade is the new core/topology layout. As Mark Papermaster, CTO of AMD explained.
Due to having a single cache big pool of cache rather than two split caches, Mark Papermaster explained that this will be reducing the latency between CPU/Memory therefore increasing the gaming performance.
Performance Benchmarks
AMD's official numbers state that they're performing better on all fronts when compared to Intel's equivalent CPU, with cheaper pricing, less TDP and higher power per watt.
As I wrote previously, AMD's presentation stated they had 19% IPC improvement over the last generation, however, with their additional changes such as the layout of the cores and overall topology, they introduced 26% average increase in gaming performance. 26%! That's a lot!
I should also state that they have talked about their single-threaded performance and how their customers had challenged them to increase it. So, they've answered. With a synthetic Cinebench single-threaded performance score of 631. A score that has never been seen before, while their equivalent competitor, Intel i9-10900k only managed to get 544. While it is not necessarily 100% true that getting these numbers in a synthetic benchmark is accurate, even if it performs the same as Intel, it's still, in my opinion, a big win for the AMD.
Pricing and Specs
| Model | Ryzen 5 5600X | Ryzen 7 5800X | Ryzen 9 5900X | Ryzen 9 5950X |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core/Thread | 6/12 | 8/16 | 12/24 | 16/32 |
| Base/Boost Clock | 3.7/4.6GHz | 3.8/4.7GHz | 3.7/4.8GHz | Unknown/4.9GHz |
| L3 Cache | 36MB | 36MB | 70MB | 72MB |
| TDP | 65W | 105W | 105W | 105W |
| Price | $299 USD | $449 USD | $549 USD | $799 USD |
Big Navi
Unfortunately, we did not see much about Big Navi today. Dr. Lisa Su showed us the reference cooler and benchmarks of three games, though she did mention that the team is still ironing out performance in various games.
Big Navi's own presentation is scheduled on October 28th.
Overall
As a summary, I think these CPUs are great. I can't really comment on the GPU part since we really didn't get any explanation on how it works, just some numbers that couldn't mean anything considering AMD's past regarding the GPUs.
AMD has been delivering great performance with their Ryzen line up and they are definitely continuing to do so. It was honestly surprising to me to learn they were already able to upgrade the really well-received 3000 series to this extent and become the market leader in desktop CPU market too. (Since consoles have been using AMD for a very, very long time anyways)
Will I be upgrading? Similar to my GPU question, probably not. I already got a Ryzen 5 3600, which fits my needs for the time being. Maybe in the future when I need something better.
TL:DR
19% increase in IPC.
26% increase in gaming performance.
$50 increase in prices for the chips.
Same TDP, better caching.
Better than Intel competition by a considerable margin.
Recommended upgrade? If older than 3000 series, yes. If no, you can probably live with it for another year.
Links:
All images used in this post comes from AMD.
Thank you for reading through the post.