After the successful release of Intel’s Alder Lake CPUs, AMD appears to be fighting back against team blue’s offerings not with Zen 4, but with discounted Zen 3 processors on the desktop and Zen 3+ processors for laptops. As noted by our own Tim Schiesser, the latter wave is a decent mid-generation upgrade — especially in terms of performance-per-watt — but it isn’t able to compete with Alder Lake in higher power classes. According to a recent report, Team Red may also be preparing to release new Ryzen 7 5700X, Ryzen 5 5600, and Ryzen 5 5500 CPUs as a stopgap solution until Zen 4 is ready to ship. The rumor comes from several known leakers, so there’s a relatively high chance there are real SKUs that will soon land on the market, possibly alongside the much-awaited Ryzen 5800X3D.
The Ryzen 7 5700X will supposedly be a 65-watt part with 8 cores/16 thread, so it’s most likely designed to compete with Intel’s Core i5-12600K and Core i5-12600 processors. As explained in our review of the 12600K, Intel nailed the recipe for a mainstream CPU, and in some cases, it can at times approach Ryzen 7 5800X levels of performance. If AMD can slightly undercut the pricing of the Core i5-12600, it might have a chance at tempting some people away from the Intel offering. Arguably the more interesting of the upcoming CPUs is the Ryzen 5 5600, which is set to compete with Intel’s value champ, the Core i5-12400. The Ryzen 5 5600 will reportedly sport 6 cores/12 threads, so it’s probably going to end up in a similar performance ballpark as the existing Ryzen 5 5600X. Of course, these CPUs will be the last to work on AMD’s AM4 platform, but the Lisa Su-powered company has a real chance of making them a worthwhile upgrade path for people who are using older Ryzen processors and aren’t quite ready to do a major overhaul of their gaming rigs.
