AMD’s first event of the month just wrapped up, and with it, we now know everything about its latest Zen 3 CPU architecture. As an improvement to its previous-generation Zen 2, you’ll find Zen 3 is built on the same 7nm manufacturing process, but with quite a few upgrades. Pricing starts at $299 with the 5600X 6-core 12-thread processor and goes up from there. AMD Zen 3 will be available on November 5.
AMD’s Zen 3 is the “world’s first desktop processor” to break 600 in Cinebench single-core performance
AMD came out of the gate swinging this time around, with big performance improvements across the board. To showcase this, AMD put its top-tier Ryzen 9 5950X up against the Intel i9-10900K in Cinebench to show off the single-core performance, an area where AMD has been lacking for quite some time. Intel’s top-tier i9 scores a 544 in the single-core test on Cinebench, which is quite good really. But, AMD scored a 631 in this same test, claiming that they are the “first desktop processor to break 600 points in single-thread performance.” In a world where content creation and gaming on the same system is becoming more and more commonplace, having both single-core and multi-thread performance on the same chip is something that PC builders have wanted for a very long time.
“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 IPC, 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.”
Overhauled L3 cache offers “2x directly accessible per core”
With Zen 3, AMD is also overhauling the way that it produces the actual chip itself. With an all-new layout on the CPU dye, AMD now offers twice the L3 cache directly accessible per core. Before, there were two 16MB L3 cache zones, with half the cores being on each. As stated in their event, some games or programs will have a “dominant” core, so if it’s mostly using a single core, then it would only have access to 16MB of L3 cache. With Zen 3, all cores share a 32MB L3 cache, allowing a “dominate” core to have up to 32MB of cache to work with, delivering, effectively, twice the performance for cache-based processes.
AMD Zen 3 pricing starts at $299 and will be available November 5
There’s still a lot left to unpack about AMD Zen 3, and we’ll be covering more about this CPU in the coming weeks as benchmarks come out, as well as our own hands-on time, once we’re able to secure a sample. AMD Zen 3 will work in current-generation AM4 B550 and X570 motherboards, meaning if you have a Ryzen 3 system already, it’ll just take a BiOS update to make it compatible.
AMD Zen 3 pricing starts at $299 for the 6-core 5600X, $449 for the 8-core 5800X, $549 for the 12-core 5900X, and $799 for the 16-core 5950X. All processors will be available on November 5.
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