AMD’s third generation of Ryzen CPUs are here, including the company’s first mainstream CPU to feature 12 cores, the Ryzen 9 3900X. The company is announcing five new processors as part of the lineup, all with a release date of July 7th. AMD is claiming their new Zen 2 cores deliver 15% more IPC than previous generation chips, in addition to new features and design improvements that include larger cache sizes and a redesigned floating point engine.
At the top of the lineup is the Ryzen 9 3900X. This 12 core processor has a base frequency of 3.8GHz, and is capable of boosting up to 4.6GHz. Next, the company has a pair of Ryzen 7 processors, the $399 3800X and $329 3700X. Both feature eight cores clocked at slightly different frequencies (visible in the table below) but the big difference is TDP, a basic indicator of a CPU’s power consumption.
AMD has a few benchmarks to show off how it expects its new CPUs to perform. The company claims that its flagship 3900X will offer similar performance to Intel’s i9-9920X despite costing around half as much ($499 compared to $1,189). Meanwhile, AMD’s benchmarks suggest that the $329 3700X beats Intel’s $374 i7-9700K in both single and multi-threaded real-time rendering performance.
All of the new CPUs are based on AMD’s new X570 chipset, which uses the same AM4 socket as AMD’s previous Ryzen CPUs. In theory, this means that if you already use a Ryzen processor then you should be able to swap one of the new CPUs into your system without having to upgrade your motherboard.
Away from its CPUs, AMD also teased its next generation of graphics cards with a demonstration of the upcoming Radeon RX 5700. This 7nm-based GPU will run on AMD’s new RDNA microarchitecture, which finally replaces the existing GCN architecture that AMD first introduced back in 2011. AMD claims that, compared to its predecessor, RDNA offers 25 percent higher performance per clock and 50 percent higher performance per watt. It will also be one of the first GPUs to support the new PCIe 4.0 interface. The new GPU is expected to launch in July.
