AMD releases third-generation Ryzen CPUs and Radeon RX 5700 graphics cards

AMD Ryzen 3000 series CPUs represent biggest competitive threat to Intel in a decade; Radeon RX 5700 won't worry Nvidia quite so much

AMD released both its Ryzen 3000 CPUs and Radeon RX 5700 graphics cards on Sunday, with the Ryzen CPUs posing the biggest competitive threat to Intel's dominance in a decade.

The third-generation Ryzen CPUs - based on the Zen 2 architecture - are built on TSMC's 7-nanometre process node as, indeed, are the RX 5700-series graphics cards.

AMD's 7nm CPUs come well before Intel's much-delayed shift to 10nm. Not only have early reviews been positive, but leaked benchmarks have indicated that third-gen Ryzen will give Intel a good run for its money in terms of performance, too.

The current top-of-the-range third-gen Ryzen, at the moment, is the Ryzen 9 3900X - the 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen 9 3950X is set for release in the autumn.

However, across the range, third-gen Ryzen is more than just a process shrink, with the company having made a series of architectural changes to help improve performance. These have resulted in a doubling of floating-point calculation performance over the 12nm Ryzens, and a 15 per cent improvement in instructions per clock-cycle. AMD has also adopted support for 256-bit Advanced Vector Extentions (AVX-256), which should improve video encoding.

All third-gen Ryzen CPUs will support the PCIe 4.0 interconnect, enabling more devices to be plugged-in to the motherboard, delivering more bandwidth. Surprisingly, perhaps, third-gen Ryzen will be the first mainstream processor line-up to support PCIe 4.0. However, this will require the purchase of an X570-standard motherboard.

The Level 3 cache across the Ryzen 3000 line-up has, more or less, been doubled, with the Ryzen 9 3900X now sporting 70MB of L3 cache. This should much reduce memory latency issues and boost, in particular, gaming performance.

Other key architectural differences includes the separation of the memory controller and PCIe 4.0 controller onto separate I/O dies, although these are built on a 12nm, rather than 7nm, process. This was no doubt done to snip costs.

A Ryzen 5 3600 CPU will cost £189, the Ryzen 5 3600X will cost £239.99 and the Ryzen 5 3400G, which includes integrated Radeon Vega graphics capabilities, will cost £139.98.

The Radeon RX 5700-series graphics cards will also be up against a formidable competitor - Nvidia - but have been well-received as AMD recovers from some of the mistakes made with Vega.

The base Radeon RX 5700 will sport 36 compute units, 2,304 stream processors, 8GB of GDDR6 memory and a top clock-speed of 1,625MHz for a price of £339.98-£349.98 for cards from Sapphire, PowerColor, MSI and Gigabyte.

The Radeon RX 5700 XT, meanwhile, has 40 compute units to play with, 2,560 stream processors, 8GB of GGDR6 video RAM, and a clock speed that runs up to 1,905MHz. It is priced at between £379.98 and £394.98 for cards from the same companies.