With the Zen 3 based Ryzen 5000 processors, AMD has primarily focused on single-threaded and gaming performance. The whopping 19% IPC boost is just one of the factors enabling the near 30% generational increase in single-threaded performance. There’s the matter of inter-core latency, higher boost clocks, and wider fabric bandwidth. In the below PassMark CPU single-thread benchmark, you can see that this has allowed the cheapest Zen 3 chip to take the ST performance crown:
The Ryzen 5 5600X scores 3,495 points in the test, beating the Core i9-10900K, Intel’s fastest consumer CPU by a notable margin (3,177 points). On top of that, the former costs nearly half as much too. The Ryzen 5 5600X is a hex-core part with SMT that comes with a base and boost clock of 3.8GHz and 4.6GHz, respectively. The IPC boost along with the 200MHz higher frequency compared to its predecessor allows it to overtake “Intel’s fastest gaming CPU”.
