AMD has announced what many of us knew existed and what leaks have been revealing for several weeks – its 16-core, 32-thread 3rd Gen Ryzen CPU, now confirmed as the Ryzen 9 3950X, which is set to retail for $749. This is the most powerful ever mainstream desktop CPU yet it has a TDP of just 105W.
The Ryzen 9 3950X will have 16 cores and 32 threads, meaning its competitors in terms of multi-threaded performance will be the likes of AMD’s own 2nd Gen Threadripper 2950X and of course Intel’s Core i9-9980XE, which has two more cores.
“It’s all about gaming, because we believe that the gaming market is a phenomenal market,” Su said. “We are one of the very, very few companies that can bring what’s needed to the gaming market that we love, for every category of gaming. Gamers are some of the toughest people to please. They have extreme requirements. They want everything. They want fast framerates. They want incredible quality. They want extremely responsive. And they want it, frankly, on every platform. Do we care about gaming? We absolutely care. And we are going to win in gaming.”
The enormous 72MB cache, AMD has stated, is to reduce latency by reducing the need for the CPU to access local memory. The reason for the delay in announcing the CPU is still unclear. I’d suspected AMD was waiting for Intel to announce its next-generation high-end desktop processors, but perhaps AMD reached the limits of tweaking its new 16-core CPU and decided it would launch as-is rather than pushing things further. However, it’s very possible the company could launch a higher TDP version which, out of the box, could offer higher frequencies.
However, not every Ryzen 3000 part has 7nm Zen 2 cores. The company’s also announcing a pair of APUs today with integrated graphics, the Ryzen 5 3400G and Ryzen 3 3200G, that technically have last-gen CPUs mated with more powerful Vega graphics than previously. In the case of the 3400G, AMD’s calling it the most powerful graphics on a desktop processor.