So awesome to see AMD back in the cpu game!!!  I’m really glad that Intel has some competition now and will have to start innovating again!

So the top $249 processor is competing with Intel’s Kaby Lake i5-7600K, a 4-core, 4-thread processor running at 3.8/4.2GHz retailing at around $240, and the bottom-priced R5 1400 is going up against the i3-7350K, a 2-core, 4-thread part running at a fixed 4.2GHz selling for around $174.

Just as with Ryzen 7, the Ryzen 5 parts are going to give up quite a bit of single threaded performance relative to the Kaby Lakes; they have lower clock speeds and execute fewer instructions per cycle. But the presence of those extra cores means that in many workloads, the Ryzen will be able to hold its own, or even pull ahead, making the decision of which processor to buy more complex than it has been in the past; Kaby Lake may win for some workloads, especially older games that lean heavily on one or two compute-bound threads. But other workloads, including an increasing number of modern game engines, show much greater ability to distribute their work across multiple cores, and for those applications, the Ryzen will be a compelling option.

Source: AMD’s Zen goes mainstream with Ryzen 5: 4 cores, 8 threads, from $169 | Ars Technica