The AMD Ryzen 5000-series chips are launching November 5, and they may represent a leap forward in gaming performance and pricing.
As promised, AMD is preparing to launch its next generation of Ryzen CPUs. These chips have the Zen 3 architecture, which reuses a lot of what makes the Zen 2 so speedy. But AMD’s engineers have made revisions that should lead to a significant performance gain. In a presentation today, AMD chief executive officer Lisa Su claimed that Zen 3 is 19% faster than the previous generation across a wide variety of workloads. I’ll test it to see if that’s the case, but AMD seems confident. The Ryzen 5000-series CPUs begin rolling out November 5. This includes the $800 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X, which boosts up to 4.9GHz and the $550 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X. For the slightly more mainstream chips, AMD also has the 8-core Ryzen 7 5800X and Ryzen 5 5600X for $450 and $300, respectively. But AMD likely feels confident in pushing up the price because of the capabilities of its CPUs.
