Following plenty of hands-on time with the first AMD Ryzen 5000 processors in the HEXUS labs we can comfortably say that these Zen 3 processors did not disappoint. The HEXUS editor concluded that as well as offering "superb multi-thread performance," the new processor family were "now great at gaming". Other tech sites, tech YouTubers, and the PC gaming and enthusiast communities have shared similar feelings.
At the time of writing we are pretty confident about a similarly impressive generational leap being presented by the AMD Radeon RX 6000 lineup. However, the publically known data concerning this GPU isn't as compelling, as third party reviews remain under NDA until the first products, the Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800, are launched on Wednesday 18th November.
You might be thinking the folks at AMD can now kick off their work boots, don their flip flops, and enjoy a break but according to an interview with AMD's EVP of the Computing and Graphics Business Group, Rick Bergman, published by investing site The Street, nothing could be further from the truth - as AMD strives to provide similarly pleasing generational leaps with its Zen 4 CPU and RDNA 3 GPU architectures.
At the beginning of the interview Bergman was understandably allowed to bask in the glory of the tremendous reception that the Ryzen 5000 Series processors have received. Bergman explained that AMD had planned the processor launch for quite some time and was expecting a big success but there is only so much product partners can produce. Nevertheless, he assured The Street that "we have a very healthy amount of supply coming in," to cover the demand surge – which tallies with the assurances we saw earlier in the week from UK retailers.
On the topic of hybrid core chips Bergman seemed to indicate that it wouldn't be following in the footsteps of Intel / Arm with big/LITTLE core combos. The main reason given was that AMD portables can already provide "24, 25 hours of battery life". Instead Bergman teased about having some other power efficiency innovations.
As per our headline the AMD EVP was then quizzed about product refreshes going forward. "Everything is scrutinized to squeeze more performance out," replied Bergman and indicated that a similar long list of optimisations strategies are available that made the 19 per cent Zen 3 IPC gain possible – and Zen 4 will be moving to 5nm. On the topic of RDNA 3 GPUs, Bergman later confirmed that AMD was again targeting a 50 per cent plus GPU performance per watt improvement from generation to generation.
