DECEMBER 2020 PCWorld 35Core i9-9960X was slower and cost $1,600.
You can see that with every iteration of
Zen and Ryzen, AMD has backed Intel into a
corner. The last few reasons to consider Intel
desktop chips were narrow, but they were
real: single-threaded performance and
gaming performance.
With Ryzen 5000 and Zen 3, AMD lands
the final knockout punch, where you can see
the sweat and spittle flying off Core’s face in
slow motion.
Perhaps what’s crazier about the victories
of the previous Ryzen chips is AMD did it
without changing much. Sure, it helped to
have TSMC’s advanced 7nm process to shrink
the size of the previous Ryzen 3000 series, but
the actual core design didn’t change much.
With Ryzen 5000, AMD says it initiated a
near-ground-up redesign of the core, with three
goals: performance, latency, and power
efficiency.
For the cores themselves, AMD improved
integer performance, floating point
performance, and branch prediction. Latency,
however, received one of the biggest upgrades,
with a redesign of the core complex (CCX), the
basic building block of the chip.
Unlike Intel which fashions its CPUs from a
monolithic piece of silicon, AMD assembles
Ryzen from multiple “chiplets.” This gives AMD