AMD's upcoming Ryzen 5000 series looks set to handily steal the performance crown from Intel in just about everything. A new performance result from the Passmark benchmark shows that the mid-range Ryzen 5 5600X beats not only its counterparts in Intel's 9th and 10th generation, but the most powerful CPUs Intel has ever released. The 9900K and 10900K were handily beat by the 5600X, despite having as much as an 700MHz higher clock speeds.
In the report from VideoCardz, the Ryzen 5 5600X scored 3,495 points in the PassMark single threaded tests, while the Core i9-10900K managed just 3,177 points. That's a huge disparity considering the clock speed difference (4.6GHz vs 5.3GHz) but also in price. The Core i9-10900K has an MSRP of $550, but regularly sells for over $600 because of low stock. The Ryzen 5 5600X will retail for just $300.
This is particularly noteworthy because AMD's CPUs have held a multi-threaded performance advantage over Intel's chips for a number of years now, by offering more cores and threads for the same cost. Where it often fell behind was in single threaded performance. That gap now appears to have been closed massively, to the point where AMD now has the chance to take the single threaded performance crown too.
The 5600X is a mid-tier CPU too. It has a lower clock speed than the eight core 5800X, the 12 core 5900X, and the 16 core 5950X. The maximum clock speed there is 4.9GHz, suggesting that the single threaded performance of those CPUs will be even higher.
Ultimately this should result in the new generation Ryzen CPUs being the best for gaming and productivity. That's great news for gamers and consumers of all sorts, as Intel will be forced to lower prices to remain competitive. Whichever chip you're interested in, good times are coming.
