Hot off announcements at Computex, AMD has entered E3 with a surprising, strong announcement. The first 16-core gaming processor, known as the Ryzen 9 3950X.
With the debut of AMD's 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X, Intel's slim lead in gaming CPUs could disappear. Announced Monday by AMD CEO Lisa Su at her keynote at E3, the company also claims that its new stack of 7nm-based Ryzen 3000 chips are competitive with Intel's higher-clocked CPUs in games, and dominant in multi-tasking chores.
The big news, of course, was the long-awaited, much-whispered Ryzen 9 3950X. During her keynote, Su said the CPU, which will be available in September, features a boost clock of 4.7GHz with a base clock of 3.5GHz. The chip will sell for $749.
If you're the type that likes squeezing every bit of performance out of your memory subsystem, you'll like what AMD has in store here. DDR4-3200 is the officially supported spec although the company claims it has hit DDR4-5100 on air thanks to its new memory controller design. The sweet spot for performance, however, will reportedly be DDR4-3733 due to the Infinity Fabric tying to the memory clock at a ratio of 1:1 up to this point. Your workload will largely dictate which memory configuration is best.
AMD says that while 40 percent of its speed and efficiency boosts can be attributed to the smaller 7nm circuitry, 60 percent is the new design of its Zen 2 cores, which offer a 15 percent boost over the previous Zen architecture clock for clock.
One of the most impressive demos shown on stage was targeted directly at streamers, suggesting that even though Intel and AMD might play games at the same framerate, only the AMD chip can let you stream ultra high-quality video to your Twitch audience at the same time:
Zooming out a bit for a more generalized look at Navi, we see that AMD is once again going with blower-style coolers for the reference models. The RX 5700 XT model specifically uses an aluminum shroud and backplate with vapor chamber cooling, an acoustically tuned contour design and graphite thermal interface material.
Besides a massive cache of 72MB, not much else was said about the Ryzen 9 3950X. But its arrival means that AMD has fully fleshed out its lineup that will take on Intel's 9th-gen chips.
