3rd Generation AMD Ryzen CPUs
Now on to the CPU news, the other exciting bit of information was a lot of information given on the new 3rd generation of AMD Ryzen CPUs (Zen 2) detailed. These are the next generation Ryzen CPUs we’ve all been waiting for, and they are coming on July 7th.
It’s important to denote the differences in the naming conventions. The cores that power these new CPUs are 7nm Zen 2 Cores. The Zen 2 Core is part of the Zen processor family and this is the third incarnation of the Zen processor family. This is officially called 3rd gen Ryzen CPUs, but not Ryzen 2. The Ryzen series will still consist of Ryzen 5, Ryzen 7 and a new Ryzen 9 part. Ryzen is the CPU SKU, not the core architecture.
7nm Zen 2 Core
What makes the new 3rd gen Ryzen CPUs tick is the Zen 2 Core. For this generation AMD has doubled the floating-point performance, doubled the cache size and improved the ever-important IPC. In fact, AMD claims a 15% IPC improvement across the board, in any application with Zen 2 Cores compared to 2nd gen Ryzen. AMD claims this to be true for gaming, and general applications. If true, 15% is a big increase that we haven’t seen in a long time from generation to generation of CPU evolution. Intel has been a snail’s pace in IPC gains in the last ten years. If AMD can really pull off a 15% IPC gain from the 2nd gen to 3rd gen Ryzen CPUs then this is exciting and important as it proves AMD can innovate.
This is also the 3rd generation of the AM4 socket. These CPUs will fit in 1st gen and 2nd gen Ryzen AM4 motherboards. If you have an X300 series chipset, these CPUs will work. That means you don’t need to upgrade your motherboard necessarily, with a BIOS update in most cases it should work fine. However, you won’t enjoy the new PCIe 4.0 bus that X570 has to offer.
That brings us to the other big news, the platform itself is getting a big upgrade to PCI-Express 4.0. With the X570 chipset you will have PCIe 4.0 which can affect I/O, storage performance with newer very fast SSDs. AMD claims up to a 69% performance potential for PCIe 4.0 at the interface bandwidth improvement for graphics versus PCIe 3.0 bandwidth. With a new NAVI GPU you will have a complete PCIe 4.0 connection from motherboard to GPU.