In another swath of information has been revealed by AMD from CEO Lisa Su, we now have details of their upcoming Ryzen 2 (or 3rd Gen Ryzen, depending on how you see it) CPUs.

 AMD has revealed that they were able to squeeze an additional +15% IPC performance compared to previous generation by moving onto the 7nm node while also retaining or decreasing the total TDP package required to run the chip.

The chips that were revealed were all at the top end of the spectrum, starting from Ryzen7 3700X/3800X to the Ryzen9 3900X

Blender test up to +33% faster than competing products (multi-threaded)

The 3700X had a great showing here, beating out the competing product by rendering a blender workload about 33% faster which is nothing to scoff at.

The 3900X, by comparison, also did the same with regards to the competition.

It is interesting to note here that with regards to a per IPC performance, the 3900X is actually beating out the Intel CPU by a very small margin; we might see this advantage nullify when Intel releases their own “big chip” variation of the newer Cascade Lake family of CPUs to replace those from the Skylake family.

Pricing and Availability

Pricing

It seems like AMD was more confident in their Zen presentation, announcing really competitive prices against similar performing chips from Intel. Announced are the top end Ryzen chips with the lowest 8 core 16 thread part going for $329 USD, with the slightly better binned 3800X going for $399 USD.

The star of the show, the 3900X featuring 12 cores with 24 threads, will retail for $499 USD. It is seen beating out the Intel i9-9920X that costs more than 2x than that of the 3900X.

Availability

Lisa Su announced that Ryzen 2 will go on sale from 7/7 onwards. So really not too far away from the near future! While no lower-tier processors have been announced, I’d expect them to roll out through the course of this year. Expect at least a complete refresh of the mid-tier CPUs to 7nm as well; perhaps we would also be seeing a 6-core minimum, up from the previous 4, for Ryzen 5 processors within the same price range in order to push the envelope even further.

Conclusion

This is an excellent showing from AMD. While I am already running a 1700X in my own system, I might be tempted to pick up a 3900X for myself just to see the performance differential between AMD and Intel now from an IPC standpoint.

It is amazing to me that only after 16 years that AMD has finally had a (albeit) small leg up on Intel’s own chips. Previously, their marketing had to be mostly pinned on multi-threaded performance being the better sell compared to Intel’s IPC lead with their own processors. With the 7nm Ryzen 2, that gap has finally been nullified.

 Although, it remains to be seen whether Intel would be transitioning to a smaller 11/10nm (or even skip that and go to 7nm themselves) node for their new generation Icelake based CPUs that is rumored to come out in 2020.

Chia is the horse-author from the far flung year of 2153. While not grazing on grass pastures or reviewing old time-y games and technology from the early 21st century pretending to not know what comes next (as to not disturb the space-time continuum), he can be seen exchanging vast quantities of Earth currency for parts needed to fix his damaged space ship.