AMD looks set to offer yet more stiff competition for Intel in 2018, with the latest rumors pointing at an entirely new range of Ryzen CPUs coming as early as February.
Following news from motherboard manufacturers over the last couple of months, websites Moepc.net and Wccftech have posted information that points to new Ryzen 7 CPUs with 8-cores landing in February 2018, followed by Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 a month or so later - a similar launch schedule maybe to what we saw in 2017.
We've known that AMD's updated 'Pinnacle Ridge' CPUs would land at some point in early 2018, succeeding the original Ryzen 'Summit Ridge' range, but what's new with the new Zen+ CPUs? Well, quite a lot as it happens. They'll use a 12nm manufacturing process, which should allow for higher frequencies - perhaps a key area that AMD, despite its successes in 2017, was behind Intel, especially when overclocking was concerned and could also mean lower power consumption.
Intel is already snapping at the heels of AMD's 8-core CPUs with its recent 6-core Coffee Lake CPUs, and a large part of this is down to lower clock speeds so any increases for AMD here would have direct implications on how well it will fight against Intel in 2018. Another side to frequency is in the company's SenseMI technology, which includes Precision Boost and XFR - both features that increase single and lightly-threaded workload frequencies.
AMD already told us about Precision Boost 2, which exists in its Ryzen Mobile CPUs with integrated Radeon Vega graphics, and specific improvements have been made, for example, to boost gaming performance as some games can spawn several threads that caused Ryzen CPUs to throttle back. Precision Boost 2 prevents this drop off so it's my hope that AMD will see some significant performance gains here against Intel.
Another expected boost will be to support higher DDR4 memory frequencies. Memory compatibility, especially at higher frequencies dogged the Ryzen launch and it was only in the summer after considerable work behind the scenes with motherboard manufacturers that speeds above 2666MHz started to be easily attainable with most memory kits without having to fiddle around with countless BIOS settings.
A lot of this was down to years of optimization with Intel-focused XMP profiles, which allowed for simple set up of memory at high frequencies. Support at or above 3,200MHz is still a little hit or miss while on enthusiast Intel motherboards, it's practically guaranteed. Thankfully, AMD took the issue head-on following Ryzen's launch back in March 2017 and the situation is vastly improved. That said, we can probably expect to see improvements here in 2018 to help bridge the gap her with Intel systems.
Finally, everything is pointing to the new CPUs being compatible with current Socket AM4 motherboards, which is good news for existing Ryzen system owners.
