AMD Ryzen 5 1500X

Can Ryzen maintain the magic with four cores?

- Jeremy Laird

More cores, more threads, and more performance for less money. That’s the killer proposition for AMD’s new Ryzen CPU. Suddenly, most of Intel’s desktop processor range looks overpriced and short on punch.

But does that thinking extend to this, the new Ryzen 5 1500X, with its mere four cores and eight threads? After all, Intel has plenty of mainstream quad-core chips to choose from. And as good as Ryzen undoubtedly is, Intel still has the edge on a per-core basis.