DECEMBER 2020 PCWorld 49AMD’s Zen+ core.
In its day, the 2700X was just as
revolutionary for its price-to-performance
ratio—especially as you moved into high core
count workloads. Its primary adversary was
Intel’s 6-core Core i7-8700K. The Ryzen 7
2700X demolished the Core i7-8700K at the
bottom of the chart, where you used all of
those CPU cores. At the top of the chart,
indicating performance on fewer cores, it was
largely underwater against the Intel chip.
Wind the clock forward to July 2019,
and you see the same showdown between
the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X and its
contemporary—Intel’s 8-core Core i9-9900K.
You can immediately see that AMD made
huge strides with the Zen 2 core. The Ryzen 9
3900X is basically dead-even to slightly faster
than the Core i9-9900K, and it dominates as
you move into the heavier all-core loads.
That brings us to today, with where we
take the 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X and perform
the same test with its contemporary—the
10-core Core i9-10900K. It’s that top part of
the chart that we really want to point out. The
Zen 3-based Ryzen 9 5900X posts an
18-percent advantage in single-threaded
performance. From there it only goes up,
showing generally 20 to 30 percent more
performance from the Ryzen 9 5900X