AMD pitches its new wave of Ryzen 3000 CPUs to gamers

AMD is bullish on the prospects of its Ryzen 3000 line of products coming early next month, telling press and analysts that the firm expects to maintain and extend its lead in productivity workloads while delivering IPC and single-core speed advantages that it says will nullify Intel's historical lead in gaming performance. On top of the stack of CPUs revealed last month at the Computex trade show, AMD has also debuted the existence of a 16-core, 32-thread monster processor - a first for the consumer space.

AMD finds itself in a good position right now. Both its CPU and GPU products use the state of the art 7nm fabrication process, which proves to be of crucial importance against Intel in the processor space. 'Chipzilla' has had significant issues in transitioning away from 14nm fabrication technology - its recent products have still been excellent (particularly for gaming) but the firm is hitting the limits of the process. As good as the 9900K was, it's a bit of a glutton when it comes to energy efficiency. Meanwhile, for AMD, 7nm allows it to close up the frequency deficit of prior Zen products, while IPC (instructions per clock) enhancements could potentially make all of the difference in addressing Ryzen's historical deficit in gaming.

Ryzen 3000 isn't just a shrink to the new 7nm process. The firm has moved to a new 'chiplet' design whereby multiple dies are integrated into the same product, allowing AMD more flexibility in addressing different markets. A single chiplet typically hosts eight cores with SMT (aka hyperthreading) while IO is handled via a separate die within the same package. The 12-core and 16-core products simply add another processor chiplet to the product (the former disabling two cores per chiplet). The IO die itself can also be swapped out, opening the door to different connectivity options for, say, the server market.

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