AMD Ryzen 3000 Announced: Five CPUs, 12 Cores for $499, Up to 4.6 GHz, PCIe 4.0, Comi

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Today at Computex, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su is announcing the raft of processors it will be launching on its new Zen 2 chiplet-based microarchitecture. Among other things, AMD is unveiling its new Ryzen 9 product tier, which it is using for its 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X processor, and which runs at 4.6 GHz boost. All of the five processors will be PCIe 4.0 enabled, and while they are being accompanied by the new X570 chipset launch, they still use the same AM4 socket, meaning some AMD 300 and 400-series motherboards can still be used. We have all the details inside.

A lot of people have been after details about AMD’s next generation Ryzen platform for several months, ever since AMD teased the Matisse Ryzen 3000 design at CES back in January. Most of that information is coming out today, with Ryzen 9, Ryzen 7, and Ryzen 5 processors in the mix. All of these processors will be officially launched on July 7th (which is 7/7), correlating with the fact that the core chiplets of these products are built on TSMC’s 7nm process. This is technically a Sunday, but AMD doesn’t mind too much. In reality, it means users might even get them in the mail on the following Monday.

Before talking about features, let’s go straight into the CPU list, as that’s what most of you are here for.

The New Flagship: Ryzen 9 3900X

The Ryzen 3000 series will debut a new product tier for AMD: Ryzen 9. In this case, the Ryzen 9 3900X will be AMD’s first mainstream desktop 12-core processor. The processor is the only one of the group that uses two chiplets, in a 6+6 configuration. The 3900X will have a base frequency of 3.8 GHz, a turbo frequency of 4.6 GHz, and line up with 6 MB of L2 cache and 64 MB of L3 cache. This confirms that each chiplet has 32 MB of L3 cache, doubling what we saw on the first generation of the Zen microarchitecture. This CPU has a TDP of 105W, which for AMD processors is usually a good measure of all-core power consumption, and will be enabled with 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes (16 for GPU, 4 for storage, 4 for the chipset).

The Ryzen 9 3900X will have a suggested e-tail price of $499, and it will come with a cooler (more details in the coming weeks). AMD compared this processor in its presentations to Intel’s 12-core HEDT processor, the Core i9-9920X, which has an MSRP of $1199 and doesn’t come with a cooler.

In this comparison, AMD provided Cinebench R20 performance data comparing the two processors (it should be noted that we can’t confirm these results at this time). AMD states that in single thread performance, the 3900X beats the 9920X by +14%, and also wins in multi-threaded performance by 6%, all while having a lower TDP (165W vs 105W).

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