AMD Ryzen 3000 Series: Chiplets, 16 Cores, X570 Motherboards, and Everything Else You Need to Know

It was not too long ago that AMD’s entire CPU lineup seemed like a lost cause, but somehow or the other, this relatively tiny company managed to whip up a completely new product line and claw its way back into the game. The Zen architecture was first announced in 2015 but had been in development since 2012. The first products based on it to ship were the original Ryzen desktop CPUs, in early 2017, and at the time AMD claimed a staggering 52 percent increase in IPC (instructions per clock) compared to its previous products. Since then the architecture has been scaled to AMD’s Epyc server CPUs and Threadripper workstation chips as well.

Ryzen 1000 and 2000 series CPUs, based on Zen and the subsequent Zen+ revision respectively, have performed very well in our reviews. The company’s fortunes have bounced back, at least in the DIY enthusiast desktop space. Intel’s recent supply shortfalls over the past year have driven the prices of its CPUs upwards, giving AMD even more room to grow.

Against this backdrop, AMD has just launched its third-gen Ryzen 3000 series CPUs built using the second-gen Zen 2 architecture. Besides improvements to the core architecture, the big differentiators for Ryzen 3000 CPUs are a move to a whole new chiplet-style die layout, the use of a 7nm manufacturing process, the updated PCIe 4.0 interconnect, and a further 15 percent performance bump. We’re going to examine all of these points.

With up to 16 cores on the top-end CPU model, AMD is not holding anything back. We’ll have a full review of the first CPUs in this series, the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X and 8-core Ryzen 7 3700X, coming out soon, but in the meanwhile, here’s everything you need to know about the Zen 2 architecture and Ryzen 3000 series CPUs.

Ryzen 3000 series package showing two CCD chiplets and the discrete IO die

 

 

AMD Ryzen 3000 series lineup, specifications, and features

A lot of people are excited about the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X, which will be launched later this year, but the…