The AMD 3rd Gen Ryzen Deep Dive Review: 3700X and 3900X Raising The Bar

[harlan4096]

It’s the review we’ve all been waiting for. Since December last year – and particularly since CES – AMD has been teasing us about the new Zen 2 microarchitecture and AMD’s newest Ryzen 3000 series of CPUs. Incorporating a significantly upgraded CPU architecture and built using TSMC's latest generation manufacturing process, AMD has continued to run at full speed at a time when rival Intel has struggled to move at all. The end result is that while the first and second generation of Ryzen CPUs were all about AMD returning to competition and eating into Intel's substantial performance lead, the Ryzen 3000 series is nothing less than AMD's first shot in nearly 13 years at meeting (or beating) Intel at their own game in the desktop CPU market. It's a big moment for AMD, and an exciting one in the CPU industry as a whole.

The new Ryzen 3000 chips mark the first "big" leap for AMD since they introduced their first Ryzen processors a bit over two years ago. Unlike last year's Ryzen 2000 series, which was a more minor refresh and brought some tweaks to the microarchitecture and process node, this year’s Ryzen 3000 is a major upgrade for both CPU architecture as well as on the manufacturing node. It marks AMD’s switch from GlobalFoundries' 12nm process to TSMC’s newest 7nm node. But what’s more exciting is how AMD was able to actually implement this switch: Ryzen 3000 isn’t merely a single chip, but a collection of non-uniform chiplets, introducing this design paradigm in a consumer product for the first time.

Today AMD launches its entire new CPU lineup and platform, alongside the new Navi-based Radeon RX 5700 series. In terms of CPU coverage, we’ll be taking a closer look at the new flagship, the $499 12-core Ryzen 3900X, as well as the $329 8-core Ryzen 7 3700X and its peculiar low TDP of 65W.

Updates

(7/8): We've noticed large frequency boost behaviour changes with new motherboard firmware that was released on launch day (7/7). We are currently re-running all our test suite numbers and updating the article with the new data soon as appplicable. For further details please read here.

The CPU Line-up

MD is launching 5 different SKUs today, with the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X set to follow sometime in September. For today's launch AMD sampled the R9 3900X and R7 3700X, and we took them for a ride in the limited time we had with them, covering as much as we could.

Starting at the top we have the Ryzen 3900X, which is a 12-core design. In fact it's the first 12-core processor in a standard desktop socket, and it rather unique within AMD's product stack because it is currently the only SKU which takes full advantage of AMD’s newest chiplet architecture. Whereas all the other Ryzen parts are comprised of two chiplets – the base I/O die and a single CPU chiplet – 3900X comes with two such CPU chiplets, granting it (some of) the extra cores and the 64MB of L3 cache that entails.

Interestingly, while AMD has increased the core-count by 50% over its previous flagship processor, it has managed to keep the TDP to the same 105W as on the Ryzen 2700X. On top of this, the chip clocks in 300MHz faster than the predecessor in terms of boost clock, now reaching 4.6GHz; even the base clock has been increased by 100MHz, coming in at 3.8GHz. The big question then, is whether the new 7nm process node and Zen 2 are really this efficient, or should we be expecting more elevated power numbers?

Meanwhile our second chip of the day is the new Ryzen 3700X, which is configured and positioned as a particularly efficient model. With a boost clock of 4.4GHz and a base clock of 3.6GHz, the part should still be notably faster than the Ryzen 2700X, yet AMD has managed to make this a 65W TDP part which is going to make for some interesting analysis.

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[konku]

Well, looks like AMD made some good step forward:

Ryzen 7 3700 & Ryzen 9 3900

Ryzen 5 3600