AMD Ryzen 3000 Series CPUs Coming Soon in the Market

AMD Ryzen CPUs Overview

The release of AMD’s 1000-series Ryzen processors has extremely changed the overall market condition few years back and forced the giant Intel to come up with new product line to compete. It was just the beginning as AMD is intending to develop new Zen-based chips, following that path they have moved from its original 14nm chips to the 2000-series 12nm Ryzen processors that involve Zen+ microarchitecture. In addition, towards this evolutionary step AMD is working hard to bring its Zen 2 microarchitecture to the market consisting 7nm manufacturing process. This whole process combined with new technologies will help them to bring third-generation Ryzen 'Matisse' processors in the market. Meanwhile, Intel still struggles with their 10nm CPUs, if AMD can bring all these on time in the market they will be the first time taken the process node lead from Intel. Refer to the CES keynote AMD has demonstrated their new prototype but we still do not have the idea about what is coming with AMD’s 3000-series processors yet but what we do know is, it will be available in the market by mid-2019. Let us have a deep discussion on our knowledge regarding this processor down below.

The Performance of Third-Gen Ryzen

In CES 2019, Lisa Su the CEO of AMD had demonstrated a primary third-gen Ryzen desktop processor playing a game tied up with Radeon VII. These 7nm chips will be the first to support PCIe 4.0 x16 out of the box so we can assume that new 500-series chipsets will also support the same standard.

A pre-production Ryzen 3000-series processor went head-to-head against a Core i9-9900K and it seems that eight-core 16-thread Ryzen was about equal to the eight-core 16-thread Core i9-9900K with the score of 2,057 for Ryzen and 2040 for i9. It is obvious the AMD hasn't fully revealed the design yet but we can assume that the new one will perform higher than previous chip. Regarding the power consumption third-gen Ryzen has impressive performance of consuming 30% less power than Intel's Core i9-9900K. Moreover, in the benchmarking it has been prevailed that Intel requires a high-end motherboard, power supply, and cooler to extract the optimum level of performance whereas we can expect cheaper built in similar level of performance with low power compatibility.

After analyzing the test notes it shows both test systems evenly matched. It has also shown that AMD topped both processors with the capable Noctua NH-D15S cooler whereas Intel's Core i9-9900K has poor thermals.

The Design of the Chip

The probable design will include multi-chiplet arrangement like recently announced EPYC Rome processors. This modular design equipped with eight-core 7nm chiplet that connected to a 14nm I/O die consisting memory controllers, Infinity Fabric links, and I/O connections. Side by side with the support for PCIe 4.0 and it still having details about these resources close to the base.

It is evident that processor incorporates not larger I/O die from the 7nm core die providing enough space for a second eight-core CPU complex. It also appears to be a dip in the PCB for mounting another eight-core chiplet. According to the Lisa Su, the new design would have a space for another chiplet that lead us to assume having more than eight cores. However, core number was not specified by Lisa Su or will it come with the initial launch or in follow-up series.

At present the company is using second-gen Infinity Fabric to connect the compute die to the I/O die that provides the core of the design. It helps the chip to keep unscaled areas such as memory controllers and I/O, on a proven and mature node, leveraging the performance, advantages of the 7nm node for the important compute functions. This would be a start of broader trend in the industry to heterogeneous architectures of chips.

Support of PCIe 4.0

AMD shows the standard of PCIe 4.0 support for its 7nm EPYC Rome chips for 3000-series processors. It has been confirmed by AMD that as long as the Ryzen processors are compatible with motherboards designed for the first-gen chips it will require new boards to have full function of PCIe 4.0 standard. It would be hopeful that AMD representatives confirmed that 300- and 400-series AM4 motherboards can support PCIe 4.0 through BIOS updates that bring by the discretion of the vendor.

The older boards could support a PCIe 4.0 x16 connection to the first slot, but the remainder of the slots could revert to PCIe 3.0 signaling rates because exceeding six inches requires newer redrivers and retimers that support PCIe 4.0's faster signaling rates. It means PCIe slot closest to the CPU will support PCIe 4.0 and other slots would be free for others, but the facility would be limited based on board, switch, and mux layouts.

The 500-Series Chipset

Based on the data that third-gen Ryzen processors would support PCIe 4.0, we can assume that the next-gen chipsets would be named as 500-Series. We come to know that 14nm 500-Series chipsets would consume more power than current 28nm chipsets of AM4 boards because new chip will support PCIe 4.0. Tough it hasn’t informed about the specific lane allocations of the new chipset, but those faster lanes would be used for different types of secondary I/O devices.

There is an information available that AMD will stop using ASMedia but AMD says they wouldn’t, so we can comment that the new design parts of the chipset and simply license key IP blocks, like USB 3.1, from ASMedia.

AM4 Socket

It has been promised by AMD that AM4 CPU socket will be compatible for all chips until 2020. It will provide the freedom to use any AMD Ryzen processor on any AM4 board. This will encourage consumers switch to AMD’s new boards and chipsets than Intel. Holding the same socket for longer period earned plenty of status among enthusiasts but it also limits company’s options for the new 3000-series chips.

This AM4 socket’s compatibility of supporting two channels of DDR4 memory gives us a hint that new 3000-series models would do the same because each channel requires its own dedicated pins for communication. The current alignment of the AM4 socket tells us that new chips would likely have a dual-channel memory controller.

We also don’t expect upgrade in DDR5 for recent future because there are not enough signs in the broader motherboard and memory module ecosystem. Seeing towards the growth of its market share AMD unlikely to have any change in DDR5, it might come from Intel.

The company hasn’t informed much about the process of Ryzen 3000-series chips, but it has been claimed on the inauguration of EPYC data center chips that the process will bring twice the density splitting the power consumption of certain level. They also claim that 7nm also offers 1.25x the performance at the same power level. The consumers will receive these advantages in faster and cheaper chips.

AMD’s CTO Mark Papermaster expects 25 percent increase in performance in new process but it would be challenging. He also said that moving to EUV (extreme ultraviolet) manufacturing that comes with 7nm+ node will provide “modest” device performance opportunities.

But it is a fact that TSMC’s 7nm is not denser than Intel’s 10nm node. Now it is the matter to see who is going to get their process first in the market. AMD is committed to deliver new node for that they must partnering with TSMC where they have to compete with big players like Apple, Qualcomm and Nvidia for output. However, recent reports show that 7nm node will be a bit expensive, so we do not expect a huge price drop in second-gen Ryzen chips.

For Now We can Just Wait

It will be very surprising if AMD can come up with 7nm chips in volume in the middle of this year before the 10nm shrink from Intel. This whole process will not only bring the improvement on node shrink but also it will potentially push its Zen 2 microarchitecture coming with 3000-series Ryzen chips. This will bring the company closer to matching Intel in one of the few areas where the blue team still has a clear advantage on single-threaded applications. It has been demoed that AMD is reaching close to Intel's per-core performance, but they need to be tested with more workloads for complete judgement of performance. AMD’s current improvements are very competitive in many areas but if they can minimize the single-threaded performance gap, it would upset the processor market in big. This success will mainly reflect on the gaming performance of the processor. This advantage would provide AMD a major financial inflow, that could help them to gain more strength to fight against larger competitors in future.