DECEMBER 2020 PCWorld 37cores into one CCX, all eight now share
32MB of space.
This savings in latency and increase in
cache size is what AMD credits for much of its
huge gains in gaming. In fact, AMD engineers
said the impact of the large L3 on today’s
games was “eye-opening.”
The new Zen 3 cores also feature more
aggressive clock gating that can put a core to
sleep when not in use. The clock gating helps
increase boost clocks of the Ryzen 5000 and
also saves power. AMD said a sleeping core
uses no power and generates no heat, which
contributes to Ryzen 5000’s performance and
power efficiency.
The chip is so efficient, AMD said, it has
recorded a 2.8X improvement over an Intel
Core i9-10900K, as well as massive
performance gains over the previous 7nm
Ryzen 3000 CPUs, without drawing any
additional power. While AMD doesn’t say,
we’d guess this would also contribute a lot to
a laptop version of the chip.
The latency improvements and the power
savings all promote the final goal:
Performance. AMD said its goal was an
astounding 19 percent improvement in
instructions per clock (IPC) which it looks like
it has largely achieved.HOW WE TESTED
Mature System Builders strongly cautioned.
Some benchmark results may seem
inappropriately lopsided for nerds under 13
(pre-teen ages) who have never witnessed a
benchmark battle this decisive.