AMD announces Zen 3 and 5000 series processors

Earlier today, AMD CEO Lisa Su took the stage and headed the announcement of their improved processor architecture – the Zen 3, and their new line of desktop processors in the 5000 series. 

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They seemed to jump from the 3000 series of last year to 5000 series today in order to not make it seem like the desktop processors are inferior. Currently, their laptop processors are already in 4000 series.

Naming and marketing aside, Zen 3 is all about listening to consumers and AMD took note of almost all of it. The new architecture has lower latency because of improved design that leads to greater performance in both gaming and professional tasks. They were also able to squeeze more out of the 7nm process, giving out 24% more performance per watt or 2.8x more efficient than Intel’s flagship i9-10900k. 

Intel’s Core i9-10900k has one advantage over any AMD processor before which is the single-thread performance, scoring  544 in Cinebench. AMD put that to the test with the latest flagship processors and their 5900X scored 631 while the top of the line 5950X scored 640, all while maintaining a manageable 105w of power. 

For gaming, there’s an average of 26% increase in performance for the new processors, despite running on the same system and 500 series motherboards that only need a BIOS update at most. 

If you have the same system for gaming and professional work, you might want to look into the flagship Ryzen 9 5950x that promises up to 27% increase in performance, and up to 29% boost in gaming compared to the previous procies. 

The new AMD 5000 series processors starts with the Ryzen 5 5600X, Ryzen 7 5800X, Ryzen 9 5900X, and Ryzen 9 5950X which go for $299, $449, $549, and $799 respectively. As usual with AMD, there will be more variations of these processors as months go by. 

All processors will be available “worldwide” on November 5, according to CEO Lisa Su. It would remain to be seen if local distributors here can keep up with that promised date. She also teased that AMD is already working on their 5nm Zen4 architecture, and that there will be a separate event on October 28 for their Radeon 6000 series GPU nicknamed ‘Big Navi’.