Zen 3 is supposed to be announced this month, and many sources have provided the press with news on what that release may give us in the coming weeks.
The SKU’s leaked, courtesy of Videocardz yet again, are the Ryzen 5000 “Vermeer” series CPUs. We have indeed skipped Ryzen 4000 for desktop, it seems, presumably to bring all CPUs, mobile and desktop, together in the future in nomenclature. It is a confusing scheme, but we shall go through what we have from the leaks.
The leaked AMD Zen 3 CPUs so far
There are four CPUs leaked, two Ryzen 9 SKUs, one Ryzen 7 and another Ryzen 5. These are the 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X, the 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X, which seem to be not any different from the older 3950X and 3900X in cores and thread counts. However, there may be other improvements that we don’t know of yet, as this is an architectural leap, albeit on the same TSMC 7nm process as we have seen on the Ryzen 3000 CPUs.
Similarly, there is Ryzen 7 5800X and Ryzen 5 5600X, with 8 and 6 cores respectively, similar to their predecessors. All these SKUs so far seem to support Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT), so have double the threads compared to their core counts. There also is some speculation on the cache sizes of the CPU’s as well, as noted below:
Leaked benchmark showing Zen 3’s generational leap
A Twitter user, CapFrameX, leaked a table with Ashes of the Singularity used as a benchmark for the Ryzen 7 5800X, compared to the Intel i9-10900K, and the Ryzen 7 3800X. The framerates show that the new CPU may outshine both the older CPUs and by a decent margin. But since Ashes is mostly a CPU-heavy benchmark, it may not be very representative of how all other games will perform.
If Zen 3 CPUs can trump the Intel 10th-generation chips consistently in gaming, it will be another major blow to Intel’s gaming superiority, something they have been losing for the past couple of years now. AMD also may try to compete on pricing against Intel, making their CPU’s a stronger proposition despite having marginally weaker or equal performance. But Intel’s 11th-generation CPU’s may also be coming soon, and we wish to see that compete hard in the market.
When will we see Zen 3 hit the shelves?
AMD shall officially announce the Zen 3 CPUs next week, on 8th October. The release of the CPUs themselves, reportedly, is slated to be 20th October. Hence, Zen 3 may be here just this month. What is up in the air is what CPUs may come out on that date, though. The release will be a major uplift in performance for AMD, as they have already confirmed that this will be a generational leap in performance in all workloads.
The upcoming series of CPUs from AMD may be the last hurrah for the well-supported AM4 CPU socket, which AMD promised on its release in 2017, to be supported through 2020, and it has now been delivered. The new socket may bring with it newer standards, such as DDR5 RAM, more capabilities for PCIe 4.0 connectivity and more power efficiency with tighter processes bring implemented in the manufacture of newer AMD CPU’s. AMD’s roadmap post this release is mostly speculative, though.
We also will see AMD’s CEO Lisa Su speak at the keynote of CES early next year, and there may be something to see over there as well. Additionally, this month we may see the reveal of Radeon RX 6000 GPUs, which are also mired by rumours and speculation about their performance and potential.
