Thread by @Kavaeric

Some mixed thoughts from the Ryzen launch announcement

What I was most bummed out about was the lack of non-X Zen 3 CPUs, especially a lack of a direct successor to the Ryzen 5 3600 which was probably the best CPU of the last generation all things considered

The X chips we saw have all been hiked $50 from their predecessors, appearing to show that AMD is more confident and thus does not need to lean so heavily on value proposition, especially given their claims that their CPUs are now superior to Intel's offerings across the board

The architecture stuff is interesting though, with the consolidation of the L3 cache, but it's hard to really say what the performance uplift will be like without third party benchmarking

All in all while it's cool to see continued gains in Ryzen, especially with how they claim they're ahead of Intel in gaming and single-threaded workloads, the Ryzen announcement honestly doesn't tell us a whole lot

With the bulk of AMD's performance claims supposedly deriving from the Zen 3 architecture, it does kind of render the given clock speed and cache numbers moot

Additionally it's been a long standing trend to (generally) recommend the tier-under/non-X alternative to a sku if available. The 3600 was much more compelling than the 3600X, and the 3700X was a better choice versus the 3800X

As such if a 5600 and/or a 5700X were to come out I would be far more interested to see how those improve over last-gen, since that will likely comprise the vast majority of what I will be recommending people put in their machines

There is a compelling possibility that the 5600X ends becoming a competent CPU for a 4K/high-end VR gaming, replacing the 3700X for $30 less, but the loss of two cores and four threads means this proposition doesn't sound as sweet for entry/hobbyist workstations

We will probably just have to see how the lineup actually compares come the embargo lifting in November, and when (not if) the non-X Zen 3 chips will be announced and released

inb4 AMD pulls the rug right under us and announces Ryzen 4 or some shit