AMD has officially revealed its slate of Zen 3-powered desktop CPUs, skipping the 4000 series and jumping right into the new Ryzen 5000 series. The company revealed 4 new CPUs in total, boasting that the Ryzen 5900 is now the "world's best gaming CPU."

The big difference with the new Zen 3 architecture is the increase in instructions per cycle, letting CPUs with the same core frequencies and core counts perform a lot better. Compared to Zen 2, which powers the current Ryzen 3000 series, Zen 3 achieves 19% more IPC, converting to an average of nearly 26% more performance in gaming alone when moving to the Ryzen 5000 series.

The jump between generations alone is massive, but it's Intel's gaming crown that AMD really aimed for during the presentation. The flagship of the Ryzen 5000 series, the Ryzen 3950X, doesn’t match the Intel Core i9-10900K in sheer single-core speed (4.9Ghz vs. Intel's peak of 5.3GHz), but AMD's own benchmarks in a suite of games show the Ryzen inching ahead in most scenarios where the CPU is the bottleneck. Those results will need to be verified in real-world use, but if they hold, it's a big blow to Intel which only has new CPUs launching early in 2021.

AMD has officially revealed its slate of Zen 3-powered desktop CPUs, skipping the 4000 series and jumping right into the new Ryzen 5000 series. The company revealed 4 new CPUs in total, boasting that the Ryzen 5900 is now the "world's best gaming CPU."

The big difference with the new Zen 3 architecture is the increase in instructions per cycle, letting CPUs with the same core frequencies and core counts perform a lot better. Compared to Zen 2, which powers the current Ryzen 3000 series, Zen 3 achieves 19% more IPC, converting to an average of nearly 26% more performance in gaming alone when moving to the Ryzen 5000 series.

The jump between generations alone is massive, but it's Intel's gaming crown that AMD really aimed for during the presentation. The flagship of the Ryzen 5000 series, the Ryzen 3950X, doesn’t match the Intel Core i9-10900K in sheer single-core speed (4.9Ghz vs. Intel's peak of 5.3GHz), but AMD's own benchmarks in a suite of games show the Ryzen inching ahead in most scenarios where the CPU is the bottleneck. Those results will need to be verified in real-world use, but if they hold, it's a big blow to Intel which only has new CPUs launching early in 2021.