AMD Ryzen 5000 CPUs are almost twice as fast as original Ryzen processors

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
(Image credit: Future)

AMD’s new Ryzen 5000 chips, based on Zen 3, offer not far off double the performance of first-gen Ryzen CPUs with the original Zen architecture.

This is according to a performance review undertaken by Golem.de, which showed that Ryzen 5000 processors have made speed gains of up to 80% compared to the original chips.

Remember that the Ryzen 1000-series came out in March 2017, so since then, in well under four years, we’ve seen four generations of chips arrive on the desktop, and a huge leap in performance the likes of which hasn’t been witnessed in over a decade, as Wccftech reports.

The technical innovation which AMD has shown with Ryzen is nothing short of outstanding, and that has been reflected in the way that the company has gained total domination of the desktop CPU market in these last few years, leaving Intel way behind.

Those original Ryzen processors made the biggest leap of all, with a 52% IPC (instructions per clock) gain compared to AMD’s predecessor Excavator chips. Zen+ eked out another 3% increase, and Zen 2 a 13% uptick, with the latest Zen 3 architecture delivering a 19% uplift as we recently saw.

Gaming strengths

Comparing the Ryzen 7 1800X to the new Ryzen 7 5800X, both 8-core CPUs of course, Golem.de’s gaming testing found that the latter was 80% faster in a small selection of games (including GTA 5 and Total War: Troy). And when it came to apps, the 5800X offered 72% faster speeds comparatively.

And all with barely an increase in TDP across the generations, with the 1800X using 95W in terms of power consumption, and the 5800X only increasing that to 105W.

We were certainly seriously impressed with what AMD has managed to achieve with the Ryzen 7 5800X in our review, where it scored full marks and snagged our ‘best in class’ processor award. It’s a strong CPU for gaming which takes great strides forward on the single-core performance front.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).