Ryzen 3000 Review: AMD’s 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X conquers all

Our review of AMD’s 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X CPU, in five words:

Damn, this CPU is fast.

But keep reading, because the Ryzen 9 3900X is likely as significant, and likely as game-changing, as AMD’s original K7 Athlon-series of CPUs that crossed the 1GHz line first, or its Athlon 64 CPU that ushered in 64-bit computing in a desktop PC.

You’d think the Ryzen 9 3900X would have a hard time achieving the same greatness. It’s true that it doesn’t quite shake all the gaming-performance bugaboos of past generations. But we think when the dust settles, the CPU series will easily be a first-ballot, CPU hall of fame entry.

AMD

It is, after all, the first consumer x86 chip to be produced on a 7nm process node. Intel’s current desktop chips are still all built on a 14nm process node, and the company will just begin to move to 10nm later this year. We suspect the chip giant is a little envious that AMD reached this tiny die shrink first.

With that production technology lead, AMD breaks out a redesigned 2nd generation “Zen” core for the Ryzen 3000 that promises double the floating point performance over the previous Ryzen 2000 series, as well as a 15-percent increase in “instructions per clock” (think overall efficiency per clock).

On an even deeper level, AMD said it has improved instruction pre-fetching, further enhanced the instruction cache and doubled the micro-op cache. Besides doubling the floating point performance, AMD has now adopted AVX-256 (256-bit Advanced Vector Extensions) (and yes, Intel fans, we know Core has AVX-512). AVX’s impact is mostly seen in video encoding today, but it can rear its performance head elsewhere too.

AMD has essentially doubled the L3 cache on the Ryzen 3000 chips, and the company is going for some Apple-esque marketing by calling it Game Cache. The cache, up to 70MB on the Ryzen 9 3900X, goes a long way toward reducing…