After months of speculation and leaked benchmarks, AMD officially announced today the 3rd Gen ‘Zen 2’ 7nm Ryzen 3000XT series CPUs aimed firmly at the enthusiast market. As has been heavily rumored, the lineup features three CPUs – the Ryzen 9 3900XT, Ryzen 7 3800XT, and Ryzen 5 3600XT.
As AMD explains in a press release authored for the occasion, ‘the Ryzen 3000XT desktop processors are purpose-built to maximize performance under any workload. Expanding on the award-winning 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen processor family, 3000XT series desktop processors are optimized with higher boost frequencies to deliver elite-level performance that dominates gaming and content creation.’
AMD says the chips offer a 4% increase in single-thread performance compared to the existing Ryzen 3000 processors and are up to 40% more power-efficient than Intel counterparts.
In terms of specifications, the Ryzen 9 3900XT features 12 cores, 24 threads, a base clock speed of 3.8 GHz, a boost clock speed of 4.7 GHz, 70 MB cache, and 105 W TDP. It will retail at $499.
The Ryzen 7 3800XT boasts eight cores, 8 threads, a base clock speed of 3.9 GHz, a boost clock speed of 4.7 GHz, 36 MB cache, and 105 W TDP. The suggested retail price is $399.
Finally, the Ryzen 5 3600XT has 6 cores, 12 threads, 3.8 GHz base clock speed, 4.5 GHz boost clock speed, 35 MB cache, a 35 W TDP, and it will ship with a Wraith Spire cooler. This one will retail at $249.
AMD expects all three models to be available from July 7, 2020. All three CPUs will be compatible with the entire 500 series chipset family from day one.
Alongside this, AMD also announced that the B550 chipset is now available worldwide. It features PCIe 4.0 support to deliver ‘high-speed performance in both gaming and multitasking.’
Furthermore, AMD revealed the new A520 chipset for socket AM4 and 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen desktop CPUs, with a reported 40 design in development. AMD expects A520 motherboards to launch in August this year from a selection of motherboard manufacturers, including ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI, Biostar, Colorful, and ASRock.
Rounding off today’s news from AMD is the launch of a rejigged and updated StoreMI storage acceleration software. It features a brand new interface and enhanced caching-based acceleration algorithm that reportedly improves OS and app boot times by up to 31% and lowers game load times by up to 13% compared to a standard hard drive. AMD says, ‘StoreMI is ideal for achieving SSD level speed with HDD level capacity.’