AMD always remains ZEN !

It is with great impatience and curiosity that hardware enthusiasts were finally able to discover the new range of AMD CPUs, during a conference offered by the foundry last Thursday on their own Youtube channel. Organized in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic period, this important meeting for the firm nevertheless took place without the participation of the public or the press. This less festive side allowed Lisa Su and her team to focus on the presentation of the new Zen 3 series of processors, available to the public very soon. Without any detour, this new architectural revision will reinforce the expectations of a public fond of performance in games.

Because if there is one guideline at AMD, it is to offer results that are constantly increasing from one generation to the next. Zen 3 is no exception to the rule, even if at first glance it's a simple refresh of what we experienced with Zen 2. Presumably, this new CPU line remains an optimization of the old one, notably with a complete redesign of the dyes which this time integrates not chiplets composed of 4 cores but 8 unified cores. This new design gives the possibility to considerably reduce latency, while gathering an important cache in a single block. This is a more decisive factor for in-game performance, as is the promise to offer 19% more IPC (Instruction Per Cycle) compared to the previous generation on single-core stacks and more than 26% more overall performance.

Unbeatable price/performance ratio ?

Still in 7nm, Zen 3 proudly displays a score of 631 points in the Cinebench 3D rendering benchmark (5900X), compared to 544 points for its direct competitor (i9-10900K). Very encouraging figures even if they need to be verified in real life conditions. With a maximum TDP of 105 Watts, they are still very competitive processors. To drive the nail in, the manufacturer announces that these significant gains have been achieved without changing the socket. AM4 motherboard owners, you will just have to update your bios to upgrade your machines. It is clear that if AMD continues on its path, Intel has a lot to worry about.

Scheduled for release on November 5, the Zen 3 range will include five models:

• Ryzen 5 5600X: 6C/12T, 3.7 to 4.6 GHz, 35 Mb of cache, 65 W of TDP, 299 dollars
• Ryzen 7 5800X: 8C/16T, 3.8 to 4.7 GHz, 36 MB cache, 105 W TDP, $449
• Ryzen 9 5900X: 12C/24T, 3.7 to 4.8 GHz, 70 MB cache, 105 W TDP, $549
• Ryzen 9 5950X: 16C/32T, 3.4 to 4.9 GHz, 72 MB cache, 105 W TDP, $799

All that will be left to do is to wait for user benchmarks in order to get a more accurate opinion and see if the promises are being kept. For my part, I will not hide my interest in acquiring one of these future models to replace my somewhat aging i7-6700K.