5. 3rd-Gen Ryzen Runs Up to 12 Cores For $499
After teasing at CES that its third-generation Ryzen processors would feature up to eight cores and 16 threads, AMD surprised Computex with news that its top-of-the-line SKU in the new processor, the Ryzen 9 3900X, would feature up to 12 cores and 24 threads at a suggested retail price of $499.
The Ryzen 9 3900X, a new addition to AMD's client portfolio, will come out on July 7 alongside four other processors in the new family: the Ryzen 7 3800X (eight cores, 16 threads, 4.5 GHz boost frequency), the Ryzen 7 3700X (eight cores, 16 threads, 4.4 GHz boost frequency), the Ryzen 5 3600X (six cores, 12 threads, 4.4 GHz boost frequency), and the Ryzen 5 3600 (six cores, 12 threads, 4.2 GHz).
While the Ryzen 9 3900X tops Intel's competing Core i9-9900K on core count, it only sports a boost frequency of 4.6 GHz and a base frequency of 3.8 GHz, below the 5.0 GHz boost frequency and 4.0 GHz frequency of Intel's Core i9-9900K, which comes with eight cores for $488. (Intel announced a new version of the i9, the i9-9900KS, which runs up to 5 GHz on all cores).
The Ryzen 9 3900X's total memory cache is 70 MB while the Ryzen 5 3600 is half that.
AMD said one of the core features of the Ryzen 3000 desktop series is its support for PCIE 4.0 connectivity, which is being introduced in a new X570 chipset that is launching in more than 50 new motherboards from ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte and MSI. The company said PCIe 4.0 supports 42 percent faster storage performance than PCIe 3.0 devices, enables high-performance graphics cards and NVMe drives and doubles the motherboard bandwidth.
