It’s official: AMD is looking to beat Intel and Nvidia at their own game, with the official announcement of their Zen 2 architecture-based chips.
AMD CEO Lisa Su formally announced these chips yesterday, during the company’s keynote at Computex. The event debuted the Ryzen 3000 series processors, chips with significant improvements over their 2000 series counterparts, and of course the Navi, which is now officially named the Radeon RX 5000 series of graphics cards.
While those chips were heavily teased, leaked and dissected to hell and back even before the official unveiling at Computex, there is a standout that caught the attention of many: the 12-core AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, a serious threat to the existence of Intel’s very own 12-core Core i9-9920X.
This particular chip’s announcement almost feels personal. The 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X is a powerhouse that boasts better performance in terms of just about everything – on paper, to say the least. Clock speeds? The 3900X has a base clock of 3.8GHz and a boost clock of 4.6GHz, while the 9920X has 3.5GHz and 4.4GHz, respectively. Cache? The 3900X’s 70MB offering blows the 9920X’s 19.25MB out of the water. Power draw? AMD boasts a 105W TDP for their 12-core beast, while Intel’s own 9920X needs a serious wattage of 165W TDP.
It would have been a no-brainer should a somewhat informed consumer have to choose, but what absolutely takes the cake is AMD’s very aggressive pricing; the Ryzen 9 3900X will be sold at $499 SRP, against more than double that of Intel’s i9-9920X, which costs $1,199. It remains to be seen how the market at large will react to this offering from AMD, but from what I’ve seen so far, it makes no sense to buy Intel now except for brand loyalty.
The rest of the keynote went on to show some more Zen 2 chips. Notable highlights include the first Navi card, called the Radeon RX 5700, which is expected to go head-to-head with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2070. Also in the running is the 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 3700X, which has a ludicrous 65W TDP, which could mean amazing implications for the laptop market.
Lisa Su has also teased the company’s appearance during E3, where the company will probably have more to say for the upcoming Navi line-up. Expect our coverage for that event once it drops.
