AMD pulls a villain as it quietly launches 8-core Ryzen 5700 that's worse than 6-core 5600

Back at the start of the 2010s up until the middle of the decade, AMD was launching fairly bad products when it came to its processor lineup. That's because the company was relying on updates and iterations of its highly inefficient Bulldozer architecture.

AMD managed to just about survive during that time but managed to turn things around spectacularly with its Zen-based Ryzen processors. Almost every generation, AMD has managed to match performance expectations, sometimes even surpass them, and even with the latest 14th Gen Intel CPUs, Neowin found that AMD's 7000X3D processors were almost twice as efficient while offering around the same performance.

So while it seemed AMD could do no wrong, at least on its CPU front, the company quietly released its Ryzen 7 5700 non-X CPU to OEM channels back in 2022, and it appears to be named fairly misleadingly as the SKU has been found to perform poorly. In a review, YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed noted that the octa-core Ryzen 5700 was performing significantly worse than the hexacore Ryzen 5 5600.

The biggest differences are seen in highly CPU-heavy titles like Assettto Corsa Competizione and Hitman 3. On average too, the new 8-core is overall worse than the 6-core 5600 and the differential in favor of the 8-core 5700X is even bigger.

This is a curious case indeed as typically most of AMD's non-X variants are only slightly slower. The reason for this poor performance is due to the amount of level 3 or last level cache (LLC) on the Ryzen 5700, or the lack thereof, as it only has 16MB of it, compared to 32MB on the 5700X. This means cache misses on the 5700 non-X is much higher than on the 5700X so much so that it is beaten even by the 6-core part which has two fewer cores but does also pack 32MB of L3.

This configuration of the Ryzen 5700 is due to it being based on the 5700G APU wherein the onboard graphics has been disabled.

The Ryzen 7 5700 was an OEM part only initially but now it is starting to become available in retail channels as well, and it is being priced fairly close to the much faster 5700X at $175 (Amazon US | Newegg US).

It just seems like AMD pulled another 6500 XT situation here where the GPU is slower than its corresponding previous-gen part, the 5500 XT.

Source: Hardware Unboxed (YouTube)