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The big selling point for Advanced Micro Devices‘ (NASDAQ: AMD) The Ryzen line of PC CPUs, which the company launched in 2017, had a lot of cores for little money. The chips excelled at tasks that could make the most of many cores. The problem for AMD was that PC gaming is generally not one of those tasks.
The first three generations of AMD Ryzen processors offered attractive value for certain types of users, but they rivaled Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) stayed in the lead in terms of single-threaded performance. Modern PC games can use multiple cores to varying degrees, but single-core performance is often more important than the number of cores for overall performance.
With the Ryzen 5000 series, AMD’s fourth generation Ryzen desktop CPUs, the company has finally erased the only advantage that Intel has retained during the Ryzen era. Not only do the new Ryzen chips continue to perform well on multi-threaded tasks, they have also surpassed Intel in gaming performance. That would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
Image source: AMD.
The new king of the CPU
“Coming out of the other end of this review, it’s hard to believe just how far some of AMD’s performance figures have grown in the last five years,” says the AnandTech website’s in-depth review of AMD’s new Ryzen chips.
AnandTech confirmed that AMD’s claims for single-threaded performance gains were accurate. AMD had said that the Zen 3 architecture on which the new Ryzen chips are built would offer a 19% jump in instructions per cycle, or IPC, over the previous generation.
Single threaded throughput is a combination of how many instructions a CPU core can process per cycle and the number of cycles the CPU core can execute per second. AnandTech found a single-threaded performance gain of 24% on average for the newer chips, with faster frequencies paired with impressive IPC gains.
That single threaded performance gain translates directly to gaming performance. AnandTech tested a great set of games and found that newer AMD processors often stand out. In some cases, even the $ 299 Ryzen 5 5600X outperforms Intel’s much more expensive i9-10900K.
Tom’s Hardware summarizes the problem for Intel in its own review of the high-end Ryzen 5000 chips: “For now, there is no reason to recommend an Intel Comet Lake processor at the high end unless you need integrated graphics, so we’ll have to wait until for Intel to lower prices to reflect the reality that it is now the cheap alternative. “
Intel will try to fight back next year
Intel plans to launch new Rocket Lake desktop chips early next year with the goal of competing with AMD’s now dominant Ryzen chips. Those new chips will bring Intel closer to AMD in performance, but it may not be enough for Intel to regain leadership.
The Rocket Lake chips will only hit 8 cores, while AMD’s $ 799 Ryzen 5950X has 16 cores. Rocket Lake will also be based on Intel’s 14nm manufacturing process, which is very mature and highly optimized right now, but the fact is that it has been in use since 2014 as Intel has struggled with volume production. in its 10 nm process. AMD uses a now mature 7nm manufacturing process of Semiconductor Manufacturing in Taiwan for its Ryzen 5000 chips.
With Intel losing the gaming crown to AMD, lower prices may be the only move the company must make if it wants to mitigate AMD’s market share gains before the launch of better-performing CPUs. AMD has raised prices with its latest Ryzen chips, reflecting the fact that Ryzen is now the cream of the crop. That gives Intel some room to play with its own prices to better compete.
For the first time in a long time, Intel chips are not the best choice for PC gaming. A combination of good products from AMD and poor execution from Intel has dramatically changed the balance of power in the PC CPU market. This is good news for gamers and AMD, and very bad news for Intel.
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