AMD disrupted a decade of $350 quad-core from Intel with its path-breaking Ryzen processor and the "Zen" microarchitecture, which enters 5th year in the market (5 years since tapeout). AMD went into the Ryzen processor launch as a company that had been written off in the CPU space by PC enthusiasts, and "Zen" was at best expected to give AMD another round of processors to sell around $250. Boy was everyone wrong. The Ryzen 7 1800X eight-core processor brought HEDT-levels of performance to the mainstream desktop form-factor, and its HEDT counterpart, the Threadripper, dominated Intel's Core X series ever since.

Intel's first response to the 1800X was a 50% increase in CPU core counts calculating that AMD would only see marginal IPC increases going forward, and the superior IPC of "Skylake" cores, along with a 6-core/12-thread setup in the Core i7-8700K would see things through. This is roughly when Intel faced severe supply shortages that spiraled prices out of control, giving AMD space to come out with the Ryzen 7 2700X with a 4% IPC increase, and improved multi-threaded performance, but more importantly, predictable pricing at around $330. Months later, Intel refreshed its lineup with the 9th Gen, and finally attained parity with AMD in core counts, with the Core i9-9900K.

An investigative, generation-upon-generation review from golem.de paints an extremely impressive picture for AMD's efforts in iterating upon their original Zen architecture. While the first generation Zen achieved a sorely needed inflection point in the red team's efforts against arch-rival Intel and its stranglehold in the high-performance CPU market, AMD couldn't lose its vision on generational performance improvements on pain of being steamrolled (pun intended) by the blue giant's sheer scale and engineering prowess. However, perhaps this is one of those showcases of "small is nimble", and we're now watching Intel slowly changing its posture, crushed under its own weight, so as to offer actual competition to AMD's latest iteration of the Zen microarchitecture.

The golem.de review compares AMD's Zen, Zen+, Zen 2 and Zen 3 architectures, represented by the Ryzen 7 1800X, Ryzen 7 2700X, Ryzen 7 3800X and Ryzen 7 5800X CPUs. Through it, we see a generational performance increase that mostly exceeds the 20% performance points across every iteration of Zen when it comes to both gaming and general computing workloads. This generational improvement hits its (nowadays) most expressive result in that AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X manages to deliver 89% higher general computing, and 84% higher gaming performance than the company's Zen-based Ryzen 7 1800X. And this, of course, ignoring performance/watt improvements that turn the blue giant green with envy.