For a while we have speculated that AMD’s Zen 3 based desktop CPUs, codenamed Vermeer, would have very good gaming performance thanks to its increased integer IPC, 8 core CCX, and effective doubling in cache size. With Zen 3 due for an announcement on October 8th, it’s not surprising that some benchmarks are finally starting to leak, and this one found by @TUM_APISAK in particular looks promising.
It’s not usual to get this kind of benchmark, as it’s in a game we’re all familiar with (Ashes of the Singularity), in a workload that does scale well with more CPU cores and IPC, and reports the kind of performance that implies a well functioning CPU. It’s usually not interesting to report on these benchmarks if it’s from something like Userbenchmark or some old 3DMark benchmark or has a score that’s obviously too low to make sense. Thankfully, this time is different and this benchmark is worth looking at.
If we look at the CPU framerate (which is decoupled from the actual, GPU bottlenecked framerate) we can see that the 5800X enjoys a 16% lead against a 10900K result selected by TUM_APISAK. This isn’t too surprising if you’ve been paying attention to our exclusives. It was also only a matter of time before Intel finally lost to a resurgent AMD given Intel’s pace is shockingly lethargic. Though, on the other hand, 16% isn’t earth shattering and we have to consider that this is CPU framerate, and in the real world it’s likely the GPU framerate will be the bottleneck, as is the case in both the 5800X result and the 10900K result. It’s nice to see more performance but it’s not something to hype up.
Another interesting tidbit, while not new, is the fact that this is a 5000 series SKU, not a 4000 series SKU. Recently there have been indications within drivers and software that reference the upcoming Zen 3 desktop CPUs as the 5000 series. This is probably an attempt to get rid of the confusion surrounding the APUs; if AMD were to name Zen 3 desktop CPUs as the 4000 series, some might assume the 4000 series APUs were Zen 3 based, or perhaps the other way around and assume the 4000 series CPUs were Zen 2 based.
Finally, one last thing I noticed was the naming of this 8 core CPU, the 5800X. x800X class CPUs have always been 8 cores, so this is nothing new, but I had expected a 10 core SKU thanks to the increase size of the CCX, which should allow for a 10 core design. I wouldn’t expect the x900X class to go down in core count, so perhaps a 5850X exists and will come with 10 cores? Purely speculation, but it’s worth considering.
