To kick off Day Two of CES 2021, AMD announced at its keynote an expansion of its wildly successful Ryzen 5000 desktops. Up until this point, the desktop chips have only been available to buy separately, and they’ve been nearly impossible to snag.
But now, you’ll begin to see two variants available through prebuilt desktop manufacturers, with Dell already announcing a Ryzen 5000 edition of its Alienware Aurora desktop already.
These new Ryzen 5000 chips will come in at a lower TDP of 65 watts, down from the 105 watts of the original 5900X and 5800X. You can expect a drop in performance because of that, though it’s still based on the same Zen 3 core architecture.
AMD listed two options that will be available — the Ryzen 9 5900 and the Ryzen 7 5800. The 5900 still has 12 cores, while the 5800 has eight. Though they won’t satisfy PC hardware upgraders, it may be the easiest way to get your hands on the latest Ryzen silicon due to the low supply.
More importantly, they’ll begin to help AMD fight against Intel on the prebuilt desktop market. Intel has a a huge lead here, as it does in the laptop space. Earning the support of desktop manufacturers is important to getting Ryzen chips in the hands of a much wider audience of users outside of PC enthusiasts, including in the commercial space. This is as close to the initial launch as AMD has ever released versions for prebuilt systems, whereas Intel always times them together.
AMD also announced that its Threadripper Pro chips would now be available to directly to consumers through a number of retailers and system builders. These initially launched last summer, but were given a fairly limited release through Lenovo’s P620 workstations. These monstrous 64-core processors should now enjoy a wider launch for the very specific people who need them.