It's Official: AMD Rolls Out Ryzen 3rd Gen Desktop CPUs, Including a Ryzen 9

TAIPEI—Today's Computex keynote by AMD may prove to be a game-changer for the consumer CPU world going into the 2020s: a rollercoaster of aggressive price moves and promising performance projections that, if they pan out, will bring renewed competition that will benefit mainstream users, content creators, and PC gamers.

AMD CEO and president Dr. Lisa Su ran through AMD's much-anticipated 3rd Gen Ryzen lineup, with the first five new chips slated to hit the street on July 7. The new Ryzens comprise a pair each of Ryzen 5 and 7 CPUs, plus an inaugural Ryzen 9, all on the existing AM4 socket and touted as the first PCI Express 4.0-compliant desktop platform.

The new chips in the Ryzen 7 line are the first 7nm entries in the Ryzen family, using the company's new Zen 2 architecture and manufactured by TSMC. The performance projections made by Dr. Su, if they end up verified in independent testing, illustrate that AMD could be bringing, once again, some major price pressure to the desktop CPU space.

The new-gen Ryzens see a doubling of the total memory cache—important for reducing memory latency and key for improving gaming performance, an area in which earlier Ryzens, especially the first generation, faced some challenges versus equivalent Intel silicon. Some shared numbers indicate, finally, frame-rate parity between equivalent Intel and AMD silicon. (AMD demoed this using PUBG, as shown below.)

AMD also demonstrated gaming performance versus its own second generation Ryzen chips in a host of games...

Claimed across-the-board increases in IPC are also a major move forward. Dr. Su noted that AMD engineers started with an 8 to 10 percent target projection in bettering IPC with 3rd Gen, and in the final reckoning, AMD is making a claim of 15 percent improvement.

The Chips in Brief

For starters is the Ryzen 7 3700X, an eight-core/16-thread chip with a 4.4GHz boost clock, a 3.6GHz base clock, and a whopping 36MB of total cache. Its most impressive spec, perhaps, is the cure for what has been a traditional AMD sore point: power efficiency. The chip is rated for just a 65-watt TDP. It is slated to debut at $329.

Next up is the Ryzen 7 3800X, with the same core/thread count, a 4.5GHz/3.9GHz boost/base clock, and a 105-watt TDP. This chip is designed to maximize gaming performance. It should debut at $399.

The top dog, presented as a "final surprise," is the first Ryzen 9 CPU, the Ryzen 9 3900X. Touted as "the world's first 12-core gaming CPU," and designed to take on the Intel Core i9-9900X, it is a 12-core/24-thread, 105-watt-TDP chip with 4.6GHz/3.8GHz boost/base clocks and a staggering 70MB of total cache.

AMD showed this Ryzen 9 chip competing with Intel's HEDT-class Core i9-9920X, a $1,200 content-creation-class chip with the same core/thread count, with it beating the Intel offering by double-digit percentages in a Blender render. (The Ryzen 9 completed the sample job in 32 seconds, versus 38 seconds on the 9920X.)

Also coming in this first wave is a pair of Ryzen 5 chips: the Ryzen 5 3600X and Ryzen 5 3600. Both of the Ryzen 5s come in at six cores and 12 threads. The $249 Ryzen 5 3600X is a 95-watt chip with a 3.8GHz base and 4.4GHz boost clock. The Ryzen 5 3600 non-"X" is a 65-watter comes in at $199 and 3.6GHz and 4.2GHz, respectively.

All five of these new Ryzens feature 24 CPU-based PCI Express 4.0 lanes and 16 chipset lanes. AMD did not yet disclose details on bundled cooling solutions but did verify that all of these chips would ship with a cooler in-box.

More Performance Numbers, Teased

AMD also showed a host of demos highlighting the performance/value proposition of the top three new Ryzens. First, the 65-watt Ryzen 7 3700X versus the last-gen 2700X...

..and versus the i7-9700K in a Cinebench R20 render (the Ryzen won)...

And again the Ryzen 9 3900X, once again pitted against the 9920X from Intel...

X570 Unleashed, Too

Along with the new chips is the official launch of the X570 motherboard platform. The X570 chipset works with the AM4 socket as with earlier Ryzens, and it is the first PCI Express 4.0-capable mainstream platform.

Asus demonstrated the import of this with a 3DMark PCI Express feature demo developed by UL (formerly Futuremark) that shows the increased bandwidth consequences.

Stay tuned for more on the X570 boards rolling out all week at Computex, as well as eventual reviews of the Ryzen chips as we get them in-house.

(Editors' Note: Story was updated May 28 to include info on the Ryzen 5 chips, not discussed at the keynote, PCI Express lane allocations, and bundled cooling details.)