At today’s AMD Gaming Event 2020, Team Red announced its next big thing in desktop CPUs—the Zen 3 powered Ryzen 5xxx series. The event was brief—only a half hour from start to finish—with AMD announcing record-breaking internal benchmark results.

AMD CEO Lisa Su, CTO Mark Papermaster, and Director of Technical Marketing Robert Hallock took turns extolling the new gear’s features. The trio paints a picture of more unrelenting pressure being laid on competitor Intel. According to AMD testing, raw performance, power efficiency, IPC, and single-threaded performance all increased markedly compared to current leading desktop processors from both AMD and Intel.

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  Ryzen 9 5900X is a 12 core / 24 thread beast with a nearly 5GHz boost clock, but it still fits in a relatively frugal 105W TDP envelope. [credit:
  Jim Salter ]

According to CTO Mark Papermaster, Zen 3—the architecture next month’s Ryzen lineup is based on—has been in development for over five years. Zen 3 features a new unified 8-core complex that allows each core in the cluster direct access to L3 cache. Papermaster declared that the new architecture sees a 19-percent instructions per clock cycle (IPC) uplift when compared with Zen 2.