AMD’s new Ryzen 7 and 9 processors, coming in July, are poised to shake up the desktop CPU space with aggressive pricing, power-efficiency gains, and—finally!—claims of parity on gaming frame-rate performance.
Today’s Computex keynote by AMD may prove to be a game-changer for the consumer CPU world going into the 2020s: a rollercoaster of aggressive price moves and promising performance projections that, if they pan out, will bring renewed competition that will benefit mainstream users, content creators, and PC gamers.
AMD CEO and president Dr. Lisa Su ran through AMD’s much-anticipated 3rd Gen Ryzen lineup, with the first three new chips slated to hit the street on July 7. The new Ryzens comprise a pair of Ryzen 7 CPUs and an inaugural Ryzen 9, all on the existing AM4 socket and touted as the first PCI Express 4.0-compliant desktop platform.
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The new chips in the Ryzen 7 line are the first 7nm entries in the Ryzen family, using the company’s new Zen 2 architecture and manufactured by TSMC. The performance projections made by Dr. Su, if they end up verified in independent testing, illustrate that AMD could be bringing, once again, some major price pressure to the desktop CPU space.
The new-gen Ryzens see a doubling of the total memory cache—important for reducing memory latency and key for improving gaming performance, an area in which earlier Ryzens, especially the first generation, faced some challenges versus equivalent Intel silicon.
