AMD Ryzen 5 out on 11 April for between $169 and $249

AMD claims "up to" 69 per cent better performance for six-core Ryzen 5 against Intel i5 7600K

AMD's Ryzen 5 microprocessors will be available from 11 April and will cost between $169 and $249, offering a choice of both 6-core, 12-thread parts, alongside 4-core, 8-thread parts.

AMD will initially offer Ryzen 5 in four products: the flagship Ryzen 5 1600X (which was previewed when the company launched the Ryzen 7 last month), Ryzen 5 1600, Ryzen 5 1500X and the Ryzen 1400. As with Ryzen 7, all Ryzen 5 parts will be sold unlocked, as standard.

The 6-core, 12-thread Ryzen 5 1600X will dent wallets to the tune of $249 (at a guess, that will be around £230), while the cheapest Ryzen 5, the 1400, will cost around $169 (or about £150).

While AMD was keen to stress the radically lower prices of its Ryzen 7 parts compared to Intel's i7 range when it launched last month, with the Ryzen 5 AMD is keener to assert that it offers much more performance for the same money.

Pitted against a quad-core 3.8GHz Intel Core i5 7600K, for example, AMD claimed that its top-of-the-range Ryzen 5 1600X can outperform the similarly priced Intel part by "up to" 69 per cent running Maxon's Cinebench performance benchmarking tool.

Like the Ryzen 7, the Ryzen 5 range will feature AMD's SenseMI technologies that "learn and adapt to what you do", according to Kevin Lensing, AMD's corporate vice president and general manager of client computing, who lifted the lid on the new Ryzen 5 range.

SenseMI is a marketing terms that covers a bundle of different on-chip technologies, including neural-net prediction, smart pre-fetch, and precision boost, which can automatically increase the CPU's clock speed (and hence performance) without user intervention.

While the Ryzen 5 1600X will ship without a bundled cooler, the 1600 and 1500X will come with AMD's popular Wraith Spire, while the Ryzen 1400 will include the Wraith Stealth.

The Ryzen 5 will be competing in the make-or-break segment of the market for AMD, with twice as many PC and laptop CPUs sold in the sub-$300 mark compared to more expensive CPUs, such as the high-end Ryzen 7 and Intel i7.

"The idea is to offer a range of price and performance options in the mainstream segment, tailored to end-users' needs for the best frequency, the best IPC [instructions per cycle] and the best core and thread count to maximise the performance of the processors," said Lensing.

AMD's Ryzen 5 microprocessors will also, as promised, fit into AMD's new AM4 range of chipsets and motherboards unveiled with Ryzen 7 last month, with the company expecting most Ryzen 5's being slotted into AM4-B350 motherboards.

AMD's Ryzen 3 microprocessors, meanwhile, are slated for the second half of the year, which if the company's release schedule so far this year is any guide means that they could be shipping in early July.