An allegedly early sample of a third-generation Ryzen CPU from AMD is being tested by the Radeon Technology Group and its specifications are quite exciting. Looking to build on the Ryzen 2000 series CPUs, the Zen 2 CPU (which would likely launch as a Ryzen 3000 part) will be AMD's first 7nm generation of CPUs and its suggested early specifications are already impressive.
According to a well-respected poster on , the chip has eight cores and thanks to simultaneous multithreading, 16 threads. More impressive though, is its clock speed, which is said to hit 4.5GHz without overclocking. That's a few hundred megahertz higher than even the top-clocked 2000-series CPU and if it's possible on all cores, that's doubly impressive.
We're told that this chip is roughly comparable in performance to an Intel 8700K, though we would expect any such chip from AMD to dominate the Intel counterpart in multi-threaded scenarios. If it can beat it in single threaded settings like gaming, that would be huge for AMD and could mean that Zen 2 is poised to push it into contention for the top CPU provider in 2019.
If earlier rumors about the next-gen CPUs are backed up by this hardware, we expect anywhere up to a 15 percent increase in instructions per clock power, as well as a reduction in power-usage and an increase of a few hundred megahertz clock speed too, which overall would equate to a much more powerful platform.
The Ryzen 3000-series CPUs are expected to debut in 2019 with a further Zen2+ configuration (likely Ryzen 4000-series) coming in 2020 with similar low-level improvements like the Zen+ Ryzen 2000 series has seen.
