AMD Ryzen 5 Coming Very Soon

As AMD starts shipping its new Ryzen 7 CPUs, the company has teased that its lower-spec Ryzen 5 processors are set to follow in the second-quarter of 2017. According to PCWorld, AMD will be releasing the Ryzen 5 1500X and 1600X chips within the next few months, and that they will be as competitively priced (i.e. undercutting Intel) as the Ryzen 7 family.

“AMD’s Ryzen 5 1600X will be a 6-core, 12-thread chip that will run at 3.6GHz and boost to 4.0GHz,” writes PCWorld’s Mark Hachman. “As with the Ryzen 7, AMD believes that its 5-series chips will smoke comparable Intel parts in certain benchmarks: For example, using the Cinebench benchmark with all threads enabled, AMD believes that the 1600X will outperform Intel’s top Core i5 7600K by 69 percent. (AMD didn’t release any comparative benchmarks for the Ryzen 5 1500X.)”

“Jim Anderson, the senior vice president of AMD’s computing and graphics business group, said in an interview that the Ryzen 5 will bring “an amazing level of performance” to the midrange PC market, “with the same disruptive value” as the Ryzen 7,” he added.

PCWorld also says that Ryzen 3 CPUs are due during the second half of this year – along with its notebook Raven Ridge processor range – though little about the processors are known.

“AMD is saying even less about the Ryzen 3, revealing only that it will release the 3-series parts during the second half of the year,” Hachman explains. “AMD executives have also said previously that its notebook part, Raven Ridge, will ship in the second half of the year, as well. Anderson said both the notebook and the desktop versions of Ryzen “are equally important for us from a business perspective”.”