Quote:The Ryzen 7 5800X is yet another compelling piece of AMD's Zen 3-powered 7nm silicon, delivering the types of generational performance gains that we've come to expect from Ryzen 5000 and easily outclassing Intel's price-comparable chips with a better balance of single-threaded and multi-threaded performance.

However, AMD increased the price for its eight-core Ryzen 5000 chips by $50 over the previous-gen processors, leaving the Ryzen 7 5800X susceptible to competition from within AMD's own product stack. AMD's excessively-large $150 gap between the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 families also opens the door for the Core i7-10700K to slide in as a lower-priced and lower-performance alternative.

As we can see in the cumulative numbers above, the Ryzen 7 5800X offers the same level of gaming performance as the Ryzen 5 5600X. If gaming is your primary intention, the Ryzen 5 5600X is a much better value and remains our top pick for gaming. That said, as we've noted with previous AMD CPU reviews, many of those gains won’t be noticeable to users with lesser graphics cards. The tables have turned, and now Intel CPUs are the ones that are "basically just as fast as AMD" with anything short of the RTX 3080. But if you're looking for longevity, the Ryzen 5 5600X has plenty of horsepower to push future generations of graphics cards. As usual, if you need a powerful high-end chip with integrated graphics, Intel's Comet Lake is the only modern option.
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AMD has redefined the market's mainstream segment to chips with 6 or 8 cores, but it has left little wiggle room for enthusiasts to step up to eight cores without a much higher price tag. AMD really needs the 'missing' Ryzen 7 5700X to plug the big pricing gap in its product stack. Such a chip would likely remove the Core i7-10700K from the conversation, not to mention make it more palatable to step up from Ryzen 5 to Ryzen 7.

Overall, we're impressed with the Ryzen 7 5800X's performance, but its price tag leaves a lot to be desired. Given the ongoing shortages, AMD can continue to charge a premium and sell every chip nearly immediately. However, as supply improves, the Ryzen 7 5800X's pricing could prove to be the Achilles heel for an otherwise stellar processor.

Quote:MSI, the world leading gaming motherboard brand, releases optimized BIOS updates for AMD 500-series and 400-series motherboards. The latest AGESA Combo PI V2 1.1.9.0 beta BIOS has been released for MEG X570 GODLIKE, MEG X570 UNIFY, MEG B550 UNIFY / UNIFY-X, MPG B550 GAMING EDGE WIFI and MAG B550M MORTAR / MORTAR WIFI. And the rest models will be able to download soon in January 2021. The new BIOS supports AMD Curve Optimizer feature, as well as support for PCIe Resizable BAR function for NVIDIA graphics cards (in addition to compatible AMD ones).

Quote:AMD has been doing wonders in the CPU industry, with its well-received and high performing Zen 2 and Zen 3 based processors, but now it seems AMD wants to improve performance not just through faster cores, but through the use of FPGAs. Just a few days ago, AMD filed a patent for integrating FPGAs into a CPU, which would allow the processor to run custom instruction sets to extend the its capabilities. As a side note, this patent was made just a few months after AMD's acquisition of Xilinx, a company dedicated to making FPGAs.
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AMD has yet to announce any new processors that take advantage of an FPGA unit. Still, this technology could be very beneficial in the future for improving processor performance as CPU architectures continue to become more difficult to shrink.

Quote:As it stands, this sort of design would allow, in theory, for an updatable CPU that might never need to be upgraded when it comes to new instruction support: since FPGA is a programmable hardware logic, a simple firmware update could allow the CPU to reconfigure its FPGA array so as to be able to process new, exotic instructions as they are released. Another argument for this integration is that in this way, some fixed-function silicon that is today found in CPUs and that serve to support legacy x86 instructions could be left out of the die, to be taken care of by the FPGA package itself - enabling a still-on-board hardware accelerator for when (and if) these instructions are required.

This would also allow AMD to trim the CPU of the "dark silicon" that is currently present - essentially, highly specialized hardware acceleration blocks that sit idly, as a waste of die space, when not in use. The bottom line is this: CPUs with lower die space reserved for highly specialized operations, thus with more die area available for other resources (such as more cores), and with integrated, per-core FPGA elements that would on-the-fly reconfigure themselves according to processing needs. And if there are no exotic operations required (such as AI inferencing and acceleration, AVX (for example), video hardware acceleration, or other workloads, then the FPGA elements can just be reconfigured to "turbo" the CPU's own floating point and integer units, increasing available resources. An interesting patent application, for sure.

Quote:AMD’s disruptive impact on the CPU market has been propelled by a pretty simple philosophy: More of everything. That approach has manifested itself primarily in the company’s push to higher core counts, forcing Intel to follow along in order to remain competitive. That trend has decelerated with the company’s latest Zen 3 processors, though, which come with the same core counts found with their predecessors.

This raises questions about whether it’s feasible to infuse more cores within the electrical and thermal confines of today’s systems, or if software even requires a jump to higher core counts. Su says that AMD will continue to expand core counts in the future:

“If you look at what we've done between Zen 2 and Zen three, as well as between the second- and third-generation EPYC and Ryzen 4000 and 5000, we really focused on increasing single-threaded performance, as well as Improving some of the latencies and overall systems, such that we've gotten tremendous gen-on-gen performance within the same process technology,” she said.

“So, all of that is in 7nm products, and we’ve probably been able to increase performance by 20%+, depending on which metric you're looking at. There will be more core counts in the future. I would not say that somehow 64 cores is the limit, but I think they will come as we scale other parts of the system, as well.”

Quote:AMD is also announcing reduced-TDP alternatives to the award-winning AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and AMD Ryzen 7 5800X desktop processors, coming to pre-built OEM systems only. Powered by the new "Zen 3" core architecture and with a lower 65 W TDP, the Ryzen 9 5900 desktop processor offers an average of 24% faster 1080p gaming across select titles compared to the prior generation.

Additionally, AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO Processors will now be directly available to consumers through participating global retailers, e-tailers and system integrators with on-shelf availability expected in March 2021. Ryzen Threadripper PRO Processors offer an unmatched feature set to workstation customers with up to 64 cores, 8 channels of memory, RDIMM and LRDIMM support, 128 PCIe Gen 4 lanes, and AMD PRO security technologies.

Quote:Yesterday, we covered news from Mercury Research showing that Intel had regained market share from AMD in both desktop and mobile. The news, however, wasn’t all bad for AMD. According to Dean McCarron, president of Mercury Research, AMD shipped nearly a million Ryzen 5000 CPUs in Q4 of 2020.

AMD ramped up sales of the Ryzen 5000 family so rapidly, it beat its own record by more than 2x. “The Ryzen 5000 supply ramp was record-breaking for AMD by a very wide margin,” McCarron told PCMag.

The reason AMD CPUs are hard to find right now isn’t because of yield problems at TSMC. It’s because, even though Ryzen 5000 already accounts for about 20 percent of AMD’s desktop business, the company is selling every single CPU it can make.
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If we had to guess, we’d guess AMD plans to increase Ryzen 5000 availability in the desktop channel before the end of March. Intel’s Rocket Lake ships in that time frame and AMD will want to have enough Ryzen 5000 chips in-market to challenge the company by then.

Before Christmas, we didn’t have as much clarity into why everyone’s hardware was so hard to find, and some rumors suggested poor yields at TSMC as a culprit. While it’s possible that low yields may have hampered any chip just out the door, all evidence today suggests that the foundry is yielding just fine. The fact that Intel was able to take market share from AMD indicates that Intel’s yields are fine as well.

The big consumer CPU battles of the year, for those of you keeping track at home, are: Rocket Lake versus Ryzen 5000, Alder Lake versus Ryzen Mobile 5000, and whatever ARM silicon Apple ships into higher-end Macs later this year. In higher-end CPUs, we’ll have a Threadripper refresh, but if Intel is planning an HEDT product launch this year, we haven’t heard rumor of it yet.

Quote:A report has been going around online that AMD CPUs are suffering much higher than normal failure rates after PC builder PowerGPU shared an alarming tweet. That tweet, which has since been deleted, claimed that the company had received 19 dead Ryzen 5000 CPUs in a lot of 320, with 3-5 failing AMD motherboards dropping into its lap every single week. 5950X failure rates, specifically, reached up to 16 percent.

CPUs, generally speaking, do not fail. It’s not unknown for a CPU to die or show up dead, but a 6-16 percent failure rate would be far higher than expected. Multiple sites have dug into this issue, including PCWorld and PCMag. Currently, the bulk of the evidence suggests AMD CPUs aren’t failing in higher-than-expected numbers, though there’s some nuance to the data.
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AMD and Intel do not always guarantee that a given RAM clock can be maintained with fully loaded motherboards, which means the vendor may be setting a different bar for pass/fail than Intel or AMD would. There’s nothing wrong with that, especially for a high-performance vendor, but it does limit how much we can glean from this test information. Other vendors PCWorld spoke to reported no problems, with equal return rates between AMD and Intel CPUs.

ExtremeTech has spoken with a US boutique vendor and confirmed that it had seen no problems with AMD versus Intel return rates. Our own test samples continue to perform perfectly, with no issues. This is not to claim that PowerGPU was deliberately inaccurate in its own tweet — AMD is working with the company now to identify what may be going on — but its experience does not appear reflective of the wider market. If that changes, or if AMD releases any information suggesting a genuine problem, we’ll cover it.

Quote:A slew of complaints has been posted to Reddit and user forums regarding USB connectivity bugs with Ryzen systems. AMD has announced via a forum post that it is investigating the matter, but for now, the breadth of the issue remains unknown and AMD says it impacts a "small number of users." We've reached out to AMD and motherboard vendors for further comment and will update as necessary.

The issues seem confined to Ryzen 3000 and 5000 series CPUs in 500-series motherboards (i.e., X570 and B550) and consist of random dropouts for USB-connected devices. The complaints encompass a number of different types of USB devices, with issues including unresponsive external capture devices, momentary keyboard connection drops, slow mouse responses, issues with VR headsets, and, more worryingly, connection issues with external storage devices and USB-connected CPU coolers.