It’s the time of year when computer hardware developers unveil what they’ve got in store. Nvidia got out there a month ago showing off the new RTX 3000 Series, while AMD quietly sat on its next big announcement. That is, until last night when the company announced its new series Ryzen 5000 processors.

It’s more than just an impressive title, these chips represent a massive step forward AMD’s technology as they’ll also feature the company’s next-gen Zen 3 architecture. Which is all to say that these new processors, which will be available in the beginning of November, are packing some serious power under the hood.

Ryzen shine

So what’s the big deal about this new chipset? What’s setting them apart from last year’s series? Well, in comparison to Zen-2 based Ryzen 3000 series, the Ryzen 5000 offers a 19% increase in instructions per cycle and will result in “an average 26 percent improvement for customers, all while keeping TDP and core counts the same”, says The Verge.

The Ryzen 5000 series also features an overhaul of the chip’s design while still being compatible with older motherboards (they’ll need a firmware update, though). You should hopefully not need to purchase a whole load of new internals just to ensure your processor works with everything else.

What’s AMD got on offer this time?

So what exactly are the options you can choose from? Well, there are four variations of the Ryzen 5000 Zen 3 CPUs to choose from:

Ryzen 9 5950X model with 16 cores, 32 threads, and a max boost speed of 4.9GHz for $799 (R13,185 at the time of writing)
Ryzen 9 5900X, with 12 cores, 32 threads, and a max boost speed of 4.8GHz for $550 (R9,073 at the time of writing)
Ryzen 7 5800X, with eight cores, 16 threads, and a max boost speed of 4.7GHz for $450 (R7,424 at the time of writing)
Ryzen 5 5600X, with six cores, 12 threads, and a max boost speed of 4.6GHz for $300 (R4,949 at the time of writing)

AMD wanted to make it clear that the Ryzen 5000 series is the company’s next leap forward in processors, drawing parallels between it and Intel’s powerful i9-10900K processor. The Ryzen 5000s performed consistently better over a wide range of both intense and less demanding games such as League of Legends, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Battlefield V.

Alongside the announcement of the Ryzen 5000 series, AMD also teased their next big GPU: The Radeon RX 6000 “Big Navi” graphics card. No further details on the component were provided just yet but we do know the official announcement is taking place in a few weeks time, on 28 October.

(Source: The Verge)