AMD Ryzen 3000 release date, CPU specs, and performance

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This year’s AMD Ryzen 3000 CPUs will be powered by the next generation of the Zen architecture, and could be the silicon to put the red team at the top of the gaming processor hall of fame once more. The rumour mill has it that the new AMD Ryzen 3000 silicon will arrive this summer, kicking Intel into second place as number one purveyor of go-to gaming CPUs. The latest speculation is of a July 7 launch for the new 7nm processors, potentially alongside the new Navi GPUs. See, 7/7, geddit? Whatever, we’re all rather excited by the prospect of such a double whammy.

These Ryzen 3rd Gen chips will be the first desktop processors built on the 7nm process node with the ‘revolutionary chiplet design’ of the AMD Zen 2 architecture at their core. For the first time in a long time the red team truly has Intel on the backfoot, and the AMD Ryzen 3000 processor generation could bring high-performance, high-core-count computing to the mainstream.

Now before we proceed, let’s get this straight. It’s either AMD Ryzen 3000, Ryzen 3rd Gen, the ‘Matisse’ codename, or maybe Ryzen 3K because it sounds cool. It is definitely not Ryzen 3. Ever. We’ve already got those, and they’re the budget chips.

The first tantalising glimpse of these 7nm Zen 2 chips was genuinely promising. Live on stage at CES, the red team pit its eight-core 3rd Gen Ryzen engineering sample against Intel’s Core i9 9900K. The resulting bloodbath was nearly pulled from the stream for its graphic nature.

The Ryzen chip only slightly surpassed the equally core-heavy Intel flagship CPU in Cinebench R15 score alone, but it got there with a fraction of the power demand – at 133W to 180W, respectively.

Performance looks seriously promising already, but wait, there’s more. Yes, Su wanted to tease the CES crowd a little further, holding up a totally bare AMD Ryzen 3000 die on stage. So what, you ask? Well, not only is it a glimpse of the 14nm I/O and 7nm processing chiplet design, there’s just about enough space under that Ryzen integrated heat spreader to fit a whole other 7nm chiplet. That would theoretically mean 16-cores under one AM4-sized roof.

 

VITAL STATS

AMD Ryzen 3000 release date
The potential 7/7 release of AMD’s new 7nm CPUs and GPUs fits with Lisa Su confirmation of a rough release date of mid-year or thereabouts. We expect that to mean that AMD 3rd Gen Ryzen CPUs will be announced at Computex with a full release following in early July.

AMD Ryzen 3000 specs
AMD is introducing the Zen 2 microarchitecture to the mainstream market with Ryzen 3rd Gen. That means we can expect a number of new and interesting things on the specs sheet, for example: up to 16 cores, low power consumption, PCIe 4.0, and even an instructions per clock bump over the last gen.

AMD Ryzen 3000 performance
An early eight-core engineering sample of Ryzen 3000 managed to ever-so-slightly surpass the Intel i9 9900K in a Cinebench R15 multi-core run. While that’s mightily impressive, it was the 47W less than the Intel chip that it required to get there which was impressive most of all.

AMD Ryzen 3000 price
AMD hasn’t confirmed pricing, or even upcoming CPU SKUs. With a 16-core CPU potentially on the cards, we expect this chip to be upwards of the $329 price tag of the Ryzen 7 2700X. Meanwhile more modest processors further down the stack will duke it out at similar price points to 2nd Gen Ryzen.