A New Era Of PC Gaming

AMD Ryzen 9 5900X And 5950X

- Aaron Yip

Launched at $849, the Ryzen 9 5900X is a 12-core/24-thread Socket AM4 processor that replaces the Zen 2-based 3900X. The Ryzen 9 5950X on the other hand, costs a cool $1,249.

Of course, price is but one part of the story. Let’s understand a little bit more about the Zen 3 architecture and what makes it so special.

You would be forgiven for assuming that the Zen 3 is a straightforward evolution of Zen 2 – they both use TSMC’s 7nm node after all. However, AMD has redesigned the architecture from the ground up to increase efficiency and IPC performance by 19%, which is not exactly the sort of boost that comes easily. Intel would know – their last few generations of processors only had modest incremental improvements.

The biggest fundamental change Zen 3 does offer over Zen 2 is the way the cores are configured. Zen 2 has up to four cores per core complex (CCX) with each four-core cluster having access to 16MB of L3 cache. If a core from one cluster wants to access the L3 cache from another cluster it must communicate with that cluster through the I/O die using the Infinity Fabric.