Predictably, they've increased IPC and reduced latency enough to compete with Intel at their strongest point, gaming at 1080p (or older single core apps). There might be some exceptions in terms of specific software, there always will be. Generally, I do trust the benchmark graphs and expect the reviews on launch night to be impressive. The price is a little high, but one can always wait. That also helps with getting a better bin. There won't be much OC headroom but a better bin means lower voltage, lower temps, less fan noise.
I would have preferred they treat the motherboards and BIOS the same way they did Zen 2. There's no real reason why they couldn't have. Like some others have hinted above, the whole thing in the last six months has been contrived. 16MB vs 32MB BIOS chips etc. It's an artificial limitation. There's plenty ways to make it work and a couple X370 boards that are just as good as X470 boards if not better. I guess we should be thankful that they are allowing this at all, because Intel wouldn't be. AMD is still way more on the "pro consumer" side of things, although this is slowly starting to shift now. All CPU's are still unlocked and all motherboards are unlocked. Anyways, a lot of it is in the board makers hands, and they all compete with each other (for the best reputations of support). It's in their best interest, that if one board maker does a good job, they all have to. So let's see what happens. The motherboard side of things has been a bit of a mess in the last 18 months.. chipset fans, B550 released 12 months later (and in some cases being better than X570). Apparently ASUS are releasing a new X570 board (a premium board) without a chipset fan, so there you go. But the X570 chipset silicon itself is inefficient (idle wattage), and it won't be fixed until the switch to AM5 and DDR5. As there will be no X670.
Anyways, the good thing is the IO die is the same. The CPU mostly runs the same, it's only the core chiplets themselves that are new, so in terms of BIOS and overclocking and motherboards and the like.. it should be a pretty smooth transition into a 5000 series CPU. There's further optimizations in terms of controlling or customizing how the cores behave from the BIOS. More expensive prices.. but also the best CPU's that AMD have ever made. Energy effeciency, multi core, single core.. everything. It's possible that the RAM latency (measured in AIDA) will still be higher than Intel, but the way the cache is now structured.. it seems like it won't make much difference. And the CPU's will have enough raw performance to compensate for this. The single core score in Cinebench is super impressive. The fact that these CPU's have this level of performance with 16 cores is super impressive. The energy efficiency and power consumption, also very impressive. The lower clock speeds (vs 5.2 Ghz) are actually an advantage in some ways.. in terms of equal or better performance with less wattage/heat/noise. I was a little worried that the power consumption would go up (like it did from 1700X to 2700X) but apparently, it's fine.
The prices are a little high for my liking, especially internationally, when you add GST on top of it.. but this is AMD making a statement. "We are premium now.. we are Intel, we are NVIDIA" etc. Budget versions like 5700X or 5600 (non X) will be available later on. And the future is bright as well, the 2nd or 3rd iteration of CPU on the new AM5 platform, once DDR5 has had a chance to be optimized and is a bit cheaper (with high performance speeds).. is going to be super fast. If the software can catch up.. being coded to take advantage of super fast nvme, plus lots of cores.. and RAM that has VRAM speeds, it's almost like a new world of computing is starting to open up.
