AMD says its new Ryzen 5000 chips are the "best PC processors in the world", a clear shot across the bows at rival Intel and its PC gaming-orientated Core i9 series. 

Key to the new chips is the introduction of the new Zen 3 microarchitecture, which continues AMD's effort to push ahead of Intel in the performance stakes. Indeed AMD says Zen 3 offers a 19 percent generation-on-generation increase in processing (instructions per cycle or IPC). The Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 use Zen 2-based CPUs. 

Intel says its 11th-gen Core processors for desktop - known as Rocket Lake - will be coming in early 2021 and will boast PCIe 4.0 support. 

The new chips offer up to 16 cores, 32 threads and 72 MB of cache in the top-of-the-line AMD Ryzen 9 5950X. That chip boasts the highest single-thread performance of any desktop gaming processor and the most multi-core performance of any desktop gaming processor and any desktop processor in a mainstream CPU socket according to AMD.

It also says that results in an average 7 percent performance increase for a bunch of games in 1080p over the rival Core i9-10900K. 

“Our commitment with each generation of our Ryzen processors has been to build the best PC processors in the world" says AMD's Saeid Moshkelani.

"We are extremely proud to deliver what our community and customers have come to expect from Ryzen processors – dominant multi-core and single-core performance and true gaming leadership - all within a broad ecosystem of motherboards and chipsets that are drop-in ready for [Ryzen 5000 CPUs]."