We’ve had so many rumors and leaks about the upcoming AMD hardware that I wouldn’t blame you if you thought that the new CPUs and GPUs have been announced already. However, the leaks did not entirely show the full story. AMD came out with a bang at Computex yesterday and really showed the world that it is ready to take down the biggest hardware giant in the industry, Intel. The company has already been taking massive strides in both the GPU and the CPU markets. Taking on industry leaders like Nvidia and Intel on two fronts is commendable and AMD has put up a very good fight against these two. However, the hardware was still not disruptive enough to make most people switch to AMD. This fact is about to change and Intel and Nvidia should be very worried.
AMD has finally revealed its third gen Ryzen 3000 Zen 2 processors and the much awaited Radeon Navi GPUs. These are being manufactured on the 7nm node and could potentially be a game changer for AMD. First off, AMD is working on a supercomputer that will have ten times the power of current supercomputers by 2021 and the power behind it is all Zen 2 and Navi based. If the early indications are anything to go by, AMD is slated to have a massive year and could potentially disrupt the whole market.
AMD Radeon Navi Graphics
Almost 400 million people currently use Radeon graphics including console users. While AMD may not have a massive market share in the PC department, it blows everyone out of the water when it comes to consoles. Both the Xbox One and PS4 are powered by AMD meaning that the company is fully dominating that space. This is also due to the relatively better price to performance ratio of AMD hardware that helps with cutting console costs. Looks like AMD will continue to sustain this domination as the next generation of consoles will also use AMD hardware in the form of Radeon Navi graphics paired with Zen 2 CPUs. Navi manages to improve on GCN using a new RDNA architecture. AMD has been using GCN for its cards since 2012 and a refresh was much needed. RDNA will reportedly be almost 1.5 times faster than its GCN counterparts.
Let’s talk about what’s coming to the market for a bit. The AMD Navi series will be named as the RX 5000 alluding to the fact that it is the 50th anniversary of AMD. The graphics card that was shown on stage was a Navi RX 5700 and it was compared to an Nvidia RTX 2070. The RX 5700 managed to edge the 2070 by 10% in Strange Brigade Benchmark. However, AMD has always had an advantage in that benchmark so the real performance might actually be different. The main selling point of RX 5700 will be the price point though as it offers roughly the same performance as an RTX 2070 at a much lower price point. Sadly, we did not get any RX 3000 information as the leaks suggested.
AMD 3rd Gen Ryzen Zen 2 Processors
The 3rd Gen Zen 2 processors have been leaked to oblivion and pretty much everyone saw this coming. However, there were still some blanks that needed to be filled. First of all, if you don’t know, Zen 2 is a massive upgrade to the previous Zen and Zen+ architectures. It adds almost double the performance as compared to the previous gen. The cache sizes (mainly the L3) have also been doubled meaning that gaming performance will take a massive boost. This is due to the fact that a bigger cache reduces memory latency. Furthermore, Instructions Per Clock have also received a major upgrade and have improved by almost 15 percent as compared to the previous generation. This will have an effect in literally every application so you can expect some massive boosts in performance.
Zen 2 will also come with PCIe 4.0 support which would definitely help with faster data flow between components for certain workloads. AMD, in classic AMD fashion showed benchmarks to really show the performance improvement. In 3DMark PCIe test, the Ryzen 7 3800X paired with an RX 5700 managed to defeat Intel’s i9-9900K paired with RTX 2080 Ti by an astonishing 75 percent. So, expect some massive gains in that department as well. AMD revealed a total of 5 Zen 2 CPUs, the Ryzen 7 3700X, Ryzen 7 3800X, Ryzen 9 3900X and two Ryzen 5 CPUs. Let’s take a look at them one by one.
AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
The first CPU revealed by AMD was the Ryzen 7 3700X. It is an 8-core CPU with 16 threads and has a base clock of 3.6 GHz that goes up to 4.4 GHz boosted. The 3700X has a 36 MB total cache and all of this package comes with an extremely power efficient 65W TDP. As far as raw performance is concerned, AMD showed some benchmarks in CinebenchR20 comparing the 3700X to and Intel i7-9700K. The AMD CPU, unsurprisingly, managed to beat the 9700K by almost 30 percent. The Ryzen 3700X will launch on July 7th at $329. The Ryzen 7 3700X may not be the most powerful offering by AMD but it certainly manages to bring some great value for money at this price and performance level.
AMD Ryzen 7 3800X
The Ryzen 7 3800X is the bigger brother of the 3700X. There isn’t much difference between the two CPUs except a couple of changes. The clockspeeds of the Ryzen 7 3800X are higher at 3.9 GHz base boosted up to 4.5 GHz. The total cache remains the same at 36MB however the power consumption increases up to a 105W TDP which is a massive jump considering a slight improvement on clock speeds only. However, according to AMD, the 3800X will operate at higher clockspeeds most of the time and will deliver around 20% performance improvement over the Ryzen 7 2700X. AMD Ryzen 7 3800X also launches on July 7, 2019 and comes at a price of $399.
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
The Ryzen 9 3900X is the beefiest of member of the Ryzen 3000 family. It uses a couple of Zen 2 chiplets and has 12 cores paired with 24 threads. The 3900X has a base clock of 3.8 GHz that can be boosted up to 4.6 GHz. The Ryzen 9 3900X also comes with a whopping 70 MB of total cache while still being relatively power efficient at 105W TDP. In comparisons, the 3900X managed to blow Intel’s i9-9920X out of the water while consuming less power. AMD Ryzen 9 3900X comes out on July 7th at $499.
AMD Ryzen 5 3600 & 3600X
We also got a couple of Ryzen 5 CPUs, the 3600X and the 3600. Both come with 6 cores paired with 12 threads and 35 MB of total cache. However, the difference between the two is in the clock speeds with the 3600X having a base clock of 3.8 GHz and a boost clock of 4.4 GHz. On the other hand, the 3600 has a base clock of 3.6 GHz that goes up to a boost of 4.2 GHz. The 3600X has a higher TDP (95W) as compared to the 3600 (65W). AMD Ryzen 5 3600 and 3600X come in July as well at $199 and $249 respectively.