AMD confirms Ryzen 3000 launch for mid-year as part of a trio of new releases

AMD reveals 2019 product roadmap in investor presentation, with new Threadrippers also coming later this year

AMD has confirmed that its 7nm Ryzen 3000 series CPUs will be launched in "mid year", with the CPUs expected to be available in July.

The confirmation was made in the company's latest presentation to investors [PDF], which also fleshed out release dates for the second-generation Ryzen Pro Mobile, which has been slated for spring, and third-generation Ryzen Threadripper workstation CPUs, which will be coming later in the year.

The Ryzen 3000 CPUs are particularly eagerly awaited as they will be the first mainstream CPUs produced on TSMC's 7nm process architecture - well ahead of mainstream availability of rival products produced on Intel's long-delayed 10nm process.

Ryzen 3000 will be based on the Zen 2 architecture, with flagship CPUs running at up to 5GHz in boost-clock mode. AMD's second generation Ryzen CPUs were based on the Zen+ architecture, the original 14nm Zen architecture optimised for TSMC's 12nm manufacturing process.

AMD revealed details of the Zen 2 architecture at the heart of Ryzen 3000 in November. It will include a redesigned execution pipeline, better branch prediction and instruction pre-fetching, improvements to floating point processing and support for data encryption as it is transferred from disk to memory.

The Zen 2 architecture will also be the first from AMD including hardware-based mitigations for the Spectre CPU security vulnerability. And, on top of that, the Zen 2 architecture will offer a doubling of core density. Reflecting this, even the base-level Ryzen 3 3300 will offer six cores and 12 threads starting at around £100, according to the latest rumours.

These rumours - the latest appearing just last week - suggest that Ryzen 5 CPUs, offering eight cores and 16 threads running at a clock speed of 4GHz, boosting to 4.8GHz, will come in at around £180-£235. The two Ryzen 7 CPUs, meanwhile, will both offer 12 cores and 24 threads, with the Ryzen 7 3700X capable of boosting to 5GHz for around £335.

And AMD will also pit two 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen 9 CPUs up against Intel's Core i9. The Ryzen 9 3800X will offer a base clock speed of 3.9GHz and boost clock of 4.7GHz; and the Ryzen 9 3850X will offer a base speed of 4.3GHz, but be capable of boosting to 5.1GHz.

AMD's presentation also highlighted the potential for the company's Epyc server CPUs, indicating performance improvements of between 15 per cent and 56 per cent compared to rival Intel Xeon processors at the same price point. Zen 2-based Epyc CPUs, codenamed Rome, will also be coming in 2019.

The AI and Machine Learning Awards are coming! In July this year, Computing will be recognising the best work in AI and machine learning across the UK. Do you have research or a project that you think deserves wider recognition? Enter the awards today - entry is free.