AMD is getting ready to ship its first Ryzen processors based on the new Zen 2 architecture, which the company says offers up to a 15 percent boost in instructions per clock, double the cache size, and twice the floating point performance.
The first Zen 2 chips will be AMD’s 3rd-gen Ryzen processors for desktops, which are coming in July for $199 and up.
Oh, and the 3rd-gen Ryzen chips will also be the first 7nm desktop processors to market… at a time when Intel is just about to launch its first 10nm laptop chips. The company is highlighting its move to 7nm by releasing the new processors on 7/7/2019.
Here’s a run-down of the 3rd-gen Ryzen desktop chips coming at launch:
- Ryzen 5 3600:Â 6-cores/12-threads/3.6 GHz base/4.2 GHz boost/35MB total cache/65W TDP/$199
- Ryzen 5 3600X: 6-cores/12-threads/3.8 GHz base/4.4 GHz boost/35MB total cache/$249
- Ryzen 7 3700X:Â 8-cores/16-threads/3.6 GHz base/4.4 GHz boost/36 MB total cache/65W TDP/$329
- Ryzen 7 3800X: 8-cores/16-threads/3.9 GHz base/4.5 GHz boost/36MB total cache/105W TDP/$399
- Ryzen 7 3900X:Â 12-cores/24-threads/3.8 GHz base/4.6 GHz boost/70MB total cache/$499
AMD says the new chips have 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes and they’re designed to work with new X570 motherboards featuring 16 lanes, for a total of 40.
And while a performance boost over previous-gen AMD Ryzen chips is nice, the real question is going to be how these processors compare tot he competitions — AMD says they offer higher performance than equivalent Intel chips that use less power… at least in some circumstances.
For example, the company says the 65 watt Ryzen 7 3700X outperforms Intel’s 95 watt Core i7-9700K by 28 percent in Cinebench R20 multi-threaded performance tests, and by 1 percent in single-threaded performance (which doesn’t sound that impressive until you consider the TDP difference).
AMD’ new 105 watt Ryzen 9 3900X, meanwhile, is said to outperform the 165 watt Intel Core i9-9920X by 6 percent in a Cinebench multi-threaded test, an 14 percent in single-threaded.
While AMD gets to cherry pick benchmarks that will show its chips in the best light until they’re made available to reviewers and the public, that still seems like a promising result.
