In this episode of our statement program Upscaled, we looked back at the year in CPUs. From one perspective, 2020 feels like the new normal for CPUs. Intel has another high-end chip, the 10th-generation “Comet Lake”, which added a few cores but is still based on its aging 14 nm transistor design, and AMD has improved against Zen 3, version of its desktop architecture, based. up to 16 cores. It’s the same pattern we’ve seen for a few years now, with almost no surprises: the 10-core i9-10900k is impressively fast, but not that different from the 8-core 9900K, and we last had 16 cores. AMD chips got year with the 3950.
But take a closer look, and there was impressive news in 2020. While Zen 3 did not dramatically increase the core count or clock speed, it did provide a major boost in hourly instructions without increasing power consumption. After the disastrous CPU design of the 2010s that nearly bankrupted AMD, part of me waited for something to go wrong, for a new Zen CPU to be underperformed or half-baked, but Zen 3 feels like it proves AMD know what he is doing. These chips are expensive but lightning fast (we think the 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X is too much for most, but probably the best chip you can get for creating content), and it just makes us feel more excited for Zen 4, when AMD is likely to support DDR5 memory after a redesigned motherboard connection, a new manufacturing process and high-speed memory, all in the same generation. Just do not hold your breath, Zen 4 may only arrive in 2022.