As for the rest of its new 5000-series, there’s the eight-core Ryzen 5800X and six-core 5600X, which will sell for $449 and $299 respectively. AMD also saved a special reveal for the end of its launch event: the Ryzen 5950X, a monstrously powerful 16-core chip with a 4.9GHz boost speed and 72MB of L2 and L3 cache. What’s most surprising is that it keeps the same 105W TDP as the 5900X. Its power will cost you, though, as it’ll go for a whopping $799. That makes the 5950X a good option for anyone who wants performance similar to AMD’s Threadripper chips, but most gamers would be better off with the significantly cheaper 5900X.
So what makes the Zen 3 architecture so special? AMD CTO Mark Papermaster says it reworked its core design to create a unified 8-core complex, which lowers instruction latency and lets every core directly reach the chip’s L3 cache. That’ll be especially useful for gaming and and other latency sensitive tasks, like streaming your gameplay to Twitch. Overall, he said Zen 3 will offer 24 percent faster performance per watt compared to Zen 2, and it’ll be 2.4x faster than Zen 1.
AMD isn’t sitting on its laurels, either. The company says it’s currently designing Zen 4, which will be its first 5nm architecture.
