BY THE TIME you read this AMD will have officially launched its Zen 3 processors. It’s been less then four years since it launched the first Zen-powered chips, and the rate at which they have been improving has been startling. Zen 3 will offer about a 19 percent improvement in IPC (Instructions Per Cycle) on Zen 2. This means AMD has managed to scale the design faster than any other processor in the last 20 years.
Zen 3 is a ground-up redesign that AMD says will finally beat Intel at singlethreaded gaming, the one area where the Blue Team always won. There are four initial chips, spread neatly across the market. Top of the pile is the $799 Ryzen 9 5950X with 16 cores, a base clock of 3.4GHZ, and a boost of 4.9GHz. Below this is a 12-core, 3.7GHz Ryzen 9 5900X at $549; the eight-core, 3.8GHz Ryzen 7 5800X at $449; and lastly the six-core Ryzen 5 5600 X running at 3.7GHz. The new Ryzen 9s have 64MB of L3 cache, while the lesser chips have 32MB. All bar the 65W 5600X have a TDP of 105W, and although TDP figures became detached from reality a while ago, these are clearly power efficient. See page 30 deeper dive under the skin of the Zen 3 architecture.