AMD Ryzen 3 Meets Zen 2: New Quad-Core CPUs Would Rival Intel Core i3 Comet Lake

[harlan4096]

Things could get heated in the entry-level CPU space.

AMD may be secretly developing quad-core CPUs based on its Zen 2 architecture to compete with Intel's looming 10th Generation Comet Lake-S Core i3 offerings, which feature Hyper-Threading. That's if information from hardware leaker @momomo_us is accurate,

AMD deployed its army of Ryzen 3000-series (codename Matisse) desktop CPUs in May. The lineup started with the Ryzen 5 3600, which spans six CPU cores and 12 threads. That means AMD never produced a successor to the previous generation (2000-series) Ryzen 3 chips.

However, the chipmaker might have plans to rectify this, with @momomo_us pointing to alleged Ryzen 3 3300X and Ryzen 3 3100 models.

As a refresher, third-generation Ryzen chips can come with one or two 7nm (client compute dies (CCDs). Each CCD houses two AMD CCX (CPU complexes or core complexes). Therefore, each CCX contains four processing cores.

There are two ways that AMD could spit out a quad-core Ryzen 3 chip. It could salvage imperfect Ryzen 5 3600 chips and disable the defective CCX or utilize an entirely new design, where there's only a single CCX inside the CCD. The latter would help AMD become more cost-competitive against Intel's line of Core i3 CPUs.

AMD Ryzen 3 3000-Series vs. Intel Comet Lake-S Core i3*

Processor Cores / Threads Base / Boost Clock (GHz) L3 Cache (MB) TDP (W)
Ryzen 3 3300X 4 / 8 ? / 4.3 16 65
Ryzen 3 3100 4 / 8 ? / 3.9 16 65
Core i3-10320 4 / 8 3.8 / ? 8 65
Core i3-10300 4 / 8 3.7 / ? 8 65
Core i3-10100 4 / 8 3.6 / ? 8 65
*Specifications are not confirmed.

Both the Ryzen 3 3300X (100-000000159) and Ryzen 3 3100 (100-000000284) allegedly feature four cores and eight threads. A single CCX has 16MB of L3 cache and 2MB of L2 cache. They add up to 18MB of total cache on the alleged Ryzen 3 parts.

The hardware leaker claimed that the Ryzen 3 3300X and Ryzen 3 3100 will come with clock speeds of 4.3 GHz and 3.9 GHz, respectively. However, the leaker didn't specify if the reported speeds were for the base or boost clock. We suspect it's the latter.

The most interesting part about the two unannounced Ryzen 3 chips is that they reportedly adhere to a 65W TDP (thermal design power), which is the same for 2000-series Ryzen 3 chips and 3000-series Ryzen 5 parts. With the Zen 2 optimizations and the die-shrink to the 7nm process node, one would expect the quad-core Zen 2 parts to come with a lower TDP.

Being Zen 2 offerings, the Ryzen 3 3300X and Ryzen 3 3100 should come with PCIe 4.0 support, but it's not a given. In the case of the Ryzen 3 3100, it should feature an unlocked multiplier like its predecessors.

The Ryzen 3 3300X and Ryzen 3 3100 would face the upcoming Core i3-10100, i3-10300 and i3-10320. But to be fair, the aforementioned Comet Lake desktop chips also come with integrated graphics, so the AMD processors are more likely to rival the F-series counterparts.
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