In this episode of our Upscaled tutorial, we took a look at the year in CPUs. From a perspective, 2020 looks like the new normal for CPUs. Intel launched another next-generation chip, the 10th generation “Comet Lake”, which added some cores , but it’s still based on its old 14 nm transistor design, and AMD opposed Zen 3, an enhanced version of its desktop architecture that now runs up to 16 cores. This is the same pattern we’ve seen for a few years, almost without surprises: the 10-core i9-10900k is impressively fast, but not unlike the 8-core 9900K, and we already have 16 AMD core chips for the last year with the 3950 .
But look a little more closely, and there was some impressive news in 2020. Although Zen 3 did not increase the core count or clock speed dramatically, it gave a big boost to instructions per clock without increasing power consumption. After the disastrous CPU designs of the 2010s that nearly bankrupted AMD, part of me was hoping that something would go wrong, that a new Zen CPU would perform poorly or a little crazy, but Zen 3 seems to prove AMD knows what it is doing. These chips are expensive, but extremely fast (we think the 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X is overkill for most, but probably the best chip you can get for creating content), and they’re just making us more excited for the Zen 4, when AMD is likely to switch to a redesigned motherboard socket, new manufacturing process and high-speed DDR5 memory support, all in the same generation. Just don’t hold your breath, Zen 4 may not arrive until 2022.