Much of today's attention on AMD is rightfully on a whole new series of Ryzen 5000 Mobile CPUs. You can read all about them here. That's not to say there isn't more, and some ancillary news is of genuine interest for our enthusiast readers.
Reduced-power Ryzen 5000 Series
AMD has already expanded the Ryzen desktop stack with a whole host of high-performance processors, led by the Ryzen 9 5950X. Following on from similar moves on previous generations, AMD is now introducing two further chips for the OEM market.
Ryzen 9 5900 and Ryzen 7 5800 (note the lack of X suffix) arrive with all the goodness of Zen 3 but pare back the TDP from 105W to 65W.
Desktop AMD Ryzen product range | ||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Model |
Cores / Threads
|
TDP
|
L3 Cache
|
Base Clock
|
Turbo Clock
|
Process
|
PCIe
|
DDR4
|
Package
|
Price
|
AMD Ryzen 9 | ||||||||||
Ryzen 9 5950X |
16 / 32
|
105W
|
64MB
|
3.4GHz
|
4.9GHz
|
7nm
|
24
|
Dual 3200
|
AM4
|
$799
|
Ryzen 9 3950X |
16 / 32
|
105W
|
64MB
|
3.5GHz
|
4.7GHz
|
7nm
|
24
|
Dual 3200
|
AM4
|
$749
|
Ryzen 9 5900X |
12 / 24
|
105W
|
64MB
|
3.7GHz
|
4.8GHz
|
7nm
|
24
|
Dual 3200
|
AM4
|
$549
|
Ryzen 9 5900 |
12 / 24
|
65W
|
64MB
|
3.0GHz
|
4.7GHz
|
7nm
|
24
|
Dual 3200
|
AM4
|
OEM
|
Ryzen 9 3900XT |
12 / 24
|
105W
|
64MB
|
3.8GHz
|
4.7GHz
|
7nm
|
24
|
Dual 3200
|
AM4
|
$499
|
Ryzen 9 3900X |
12 / 24
|
105W
|
64MB
|
3.8GHz
|
4.6GHz
|
7nm
|
24
|
Dual 3200
|
AM4
|
$499
|
AMD Ryzen 7 | ||||||||||
Ryzen 7 5800X |
8 / 16
|
105W
|
32MB
|
3.8GHz
|
4.7GHz
|
7nm
|
24
|
Dual 3200
|
AM4
|
$449
|
Ryzen 7 5800X |
8 / 16
|
65W
|
32MB
|
3.4GHz
|
4.6GHz
|
7nm
|
24
|
Dual 3200
|
AM4
|
OEM
|
Ryzen 7 3800XT |
8 / 16
|
105W
|
32MB
|
3.9GHz
|
4.7GHz
|
7nm
|
24
|
Dual 3200
|
AM4
|
$399
|
Ryzen 7 3800X |
8 / 16
|
105W
|
32MB
|
3.9GHz
|
4.5GHz
|
7nm
|
24
|
Dual 3200
|
AM4
|
$399
|
Ryzen 7 3700X |
8 / 16
|
65W
|
32MB
|
3.6GHz
|
4.4GHz
|
7nm
|
24
|
Dual 3200
|
AM4
|
$329
|
Ryzen 7 2700X |
8 / 16
|
105W
|
16MB
|
3.7GHz
|
4.3GHz
|
12nm
|
24
|
Dual 2933
|
AM4
|
$329
|
Ryzen 7 2700 |
8 / 16
|
65W
|
16MB
|
3.2GHz
|
4.1GHz
|
12nm
|
24
|
Dual 2933
|
AM4
|
$299
|
Ryzen 7 1800X |
8 / 16
|
95W
|
16MB
|
3.6GHz
|
4.0GHz
|
14nm
|
24
|
Dual 2666
|
AM4
|
$349
|
Ryzen 7 1700X |
8 / 16
|
95W
|
16MB
|
3.4GHz
|
3.8GHz
|
14nm
|
24
|
Dual 2666
|
AM4
|
$309
|
Ryzen 7 1700 |
8 / 16
|
65W
|
16MB
|
3.0GHz
|
3.7GHz
|
14nm
|
24
|
Dual 2666
|
AM4
|
$299
|
AMD Ryzen 5 | ||||||||||
Ryzen 5 5600X |
6 / 12
|
65W
|
32MB
|
3.7GHz
|
4.6GHz
|
7nm
|
24
|
Dual 3200
|
AM4
|
$299
|
Ryzen 5 3600XT |
6 / 12
|
95W
|
32MB
|
3.8GHz
|
4.5GHz
|
7nm
|
24
|
Dual 3200
|
AM4
|
$249
|
Ryzen 5 3600X |
6 / 12
|
95W
|
32MB
|
3.8GHz
|
4.4GHz
|
7nm
|
24
|
Dual 3200
|
AM4
|
$249
|
Ryzen 5 3600 |
6 / 12
|
65W
|
32MB
|
3.6GHz
|
4.2GHz
|
7nm
|
24
|
Dual 3200
|
AM4
|
$199
|
Ryzen 5 2600X |
6 / 12
|
95W
|
16MB
|
3.6GHz
|
4.2GHz
|
12nm
|
24
|
Dual 2933
|
AM4
|
$229
|
Ryzen 5 2600 |
6 / 12
|
65W
|
16MB
|
3.4GHz
|
3.9GHz
|
12nm
|
24
|
Dual 2933
|
AM4
|
$199
|
Ryzen 5 1600X |
6 / 12
|
95W
|
16MB
|
3.6GHz
|
4.0GHz
|
14nm
|
24
|
Dual 2666
|
AM4
|
$219
|
Ryzen 5 1600 |
6 / 12
|
65W
|
16MB
|
3.2GHz
|
3.6GHz
|
14nm
|
24
|
Dual 2666
|
AM4
|
$189
|
Ryzen 5 3400G |
4 / 8
|
65W
|
4MB
|
3.7GHz
|
4.2GHz
|
12nm
|
24
|
Dual 2933
|
AM4
|
$149
|
Ryzen 5 2400G |
4 / 8
|
65W
|
4MB
|
3.6GHz
|
3.9GHz
|
14nm
|
16
|
Dual 2933
|
AM4
|
$169
|
Ryzen 5 1500X |
4 / 8
|
65W
|
16MB
|
3.5GHz
|
3.7GHz
|
14nm
|
24
|
Dual 2666
|
AM4
|
$174
|
Ryzen 5 1400 |
4 / 8
|
65W
|
8MB
|
3.2GHz
|
3.4GHz
|
14nm
|
24
|
Dual 2666
|
AM4
|
$169
|
AMD Ryzen 3 | ||||||||||
Ryzen 3 3300X |
4 / 8
|
65W
|
16MB
|
3.8GHz
|
4.3GHz
|
7nm
|
24
|
Dual 3200
|
AM4
|
$120
|
Ryzen 3 3100 |
4 / 8
|
65W
|
16MB
|
3.6GHz
|
3.9GHz
|
7nm
|
24
|
Dual 3200
|
AM4
|
$99
|
Ryzen 3 3200G |
4 / 4
|
65W
|
4MB
|
3.6GHz
|
4.0GHz
|
14nm
|
16
|
Dual 2933
|
AM4
|
$99
|
Ryzen 3 2200G |
4 / 4
|
65W
|
4MB
|
3.5GHz
|
3.7GHz
|
14nm
|
16
|
Dual 2933
|
AM4
|
$99
|
Ryzen 3 1300X |
4 / 4
|
65W
|
8MB
|
3.5GHz
|
3.7GHz
|
14nm
|
24
|
Dual 2666
|
AM4
|
$129
|
Ryzen 3 1200 |
4 / 4
|
65W
|
8MB
|
3.1GHz
|
3.4GHz
|
14nm
|
24
|
Dual 2666
|
AM4
|
$109
|
As they are destined for OEM circles, there's no indicative pricing. Frequencies are solid in spite of the rather large reduction in power budget. Our initial thoughts are they'd be great for high-performance, whisper-quiet gaming and content creation rigs.
Threadripper PRO for the masses
You may recall AMD also launched Threadripper PRO processors for the burgeoning workstation market. At that time, however, the chips were reserved for pre-built workstations from a select number of qualified vendors. Now, AMD is opening up Threadripper PRO for consumers through participating global retailers, e-tailers and system integrators. Offering up to 64 cores, 8-channel memory and 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes, PRO bridges between regular Threadripper and server-focussed EPYC.
Teasing 3rd Gen EPYC
Speaking of EPYC, Lisa Su, CEO and President, took the opportunity of the virtual CES 2021 press conference to demo 3rd Generation EPYC, codenamed Milan, running WRF, which is one of the most popular tools for climate research and weather forecasting.
Lisa showed two 32-core, 64-thread 3rd Gen EPYC Milan CPUs up against a couple of 28-core, 56-thread Intel Xeon Gold 6258R in two similar systems each running a compute-intensive six-hour weather forecast for the continental United States. As expected, the EPYC server completed the task 68 per cent faster than the Intel machine. In other words, the increase in the number of comparison cores is more than offset by significantly higher performance. This is a canned benchmark, of course, but we're interested to see how much better Milan is than Rome.