14 PCWorld NOVEMBER 2020NEWS ZEN 3-BASED RYZEN^9
AMD’s Zen 3-based Ryzen 5000-series still uses multiple chips, but
AMD has packed more of the improved cores into the CPUs to make
them finally as fast or faster than Intel’s CPUs in gaming.IT’S POWER-EFFICIENT, TOO
AMD further stressed that its new Zen 3 chips
lead in power efficiency, which is admittedly a
little less pressing for desktops than it is for
laptops, Compared to the original Ryzen 7
1800X, a new Zen Ryzen 9 offers up a 2.4X
increase in performance per watt. It’s even
greater against Intel’s Core i9, with power
efficiency 2.8X better than that of a Core
i9-10900K chip.
“This is a big, big moment for us as a
company, and for a lot of us personally,” said
AMD technical marketing manager Robert
Hallock in a briefing with reporters.
Hallock compared the
Ryzen 5000 series to the
company’s prior success with
Athlon 64, when AMD was
firing on all cylinders. “Those
times are here again,” Hallock
said. “We are about to release
a product that has full-
spectrum, total coverage
leadership of every sort of
performance metric that a
gamer, that a PC enthusiast
would want a desktop CPU to
offer. And we’re the only ones
doing it right now.”
The last surprise of the day
came from a reveal of AMD’s
new Radeon RX 6000-series
GPU and some preview
performance. AMD said thenew GPU—long called “Big Navi”—can run
Borderlands, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
and Gears of War 5 all set to their maximum
settings and well above the 60fps threshold
many gamers demand, at 4K resolution.
AMD said it tested the new RX
6000-series card on a new AMD Ryzen 9
5900X naturally. The preview numbers
would indicate the new Radeon is
competitive with Nvidia’s well-received
GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card. We have
an analysis of just what the Radeon RX
6000’s impressive numbers portend here
(go.pcworld.com/bgna).