Following on from its big reveal of Navi graphics cards, AMD's CEO Lisa Su also revealed arguably its more exciting product, the third-generation Ryzen CPUs — the Ryzen 3000 series. These chips could be one of the most impactful releases of CPU design since Intel's first generation of Core CPUs. Ryzen 3000 upgrades the architecture to 7nm Zen 2 cores, is built upon the same AM4 socket as last-generation chips, and adds full support for PCIExpress 4.0.
Cache has been doubled. Floating point performance has been doubled. Latency has been reduced, making memory interaction far faster. But the big news is the increase in instructions per clock with Zen 2. Ryzen 3000's instructions per clock sees an increase of 15 percent. That increases single threaded performance by huge margins, as well as multi-threaded tasks.
Clock speeds and core counts are lower than people expected, but still a noticeable improvement over their predecessors.The 3700x is an eight-core, 16-thread CPU with a base clock of 3.6GHz and a boost clock of 4.4GHz. It has a TDP of just 65w, however, so the overclocking potential is exciting too.
Compared to the second-generation 2700X single threaded performance is up by 15 percent, multi-threaded performance by 18 percent, and all at a TDP 40w lower. That will mean these chips run very cool and quiet and could have a great thermal and power headroom for more.
The 3800x sits at the top of the pile and increases boost clocks to 4.5GHz on the same eight cores. It also increases the base clock to 3.9GHz, though does raise the TDP to 105w. In gaming, this CPU is between 20 and 30 percent faster than a last-generation 2700X. In gaming it's roughly comparable to an Intel 9900K.
The Ryzen 9 series was also announced, with a dual chiplet design that could potentially lead to 16 cores. It will start with the 3900X, which has 12 cores, 24 threads, with a boost clock that reaches 4.6GHz. All for 105w TDP. Performance there was even higher, dominating a Core i9 9920X, a $1,200 CPU.
Ryzen 3000 CPUs will go on sale at $330 for the 3700X, $400 for the 3800X, and $500 for the 3900X. They're set to go on sale on July 7.
This chips will be supported by new X570 motherboards which will come in a large range of flavors and form factors, with ASUS alone announcing as many as 30 different X570 designs. These boards will introduce dedicated memory overclocking tools and additional power plugs to support Ryzen 3000 high-core-count CPUs.
