AMD has announced the first three desktop CPUs in its new Ryzen line, the Ryzen 7 1800X, Ryzen 7 1700X and Ryzen 7 1700. These are the first commercial products based on the Zen architecture which AMD has been working on for four years in an effort to become competitive with Intel in the high-end PC.
Ryzen 7 models have eight cores and support 16 threads. They are manufactured on a 14nm process. At the top of the lineup is the Ryzen 7 1800X, which has a base clock speed of 3.6GHz and a boost clock of 4GHz. AMD says this is the fastest 8-core processor available in the market right now. The Ryzen 7 1700X has base and boost speeds of 3.4GHz and 3.8GHz respectively, while the Ryzen 7 1700 runs at 3GHz and 3.7GHz respectively. The 1800X and 1700X have 95W TDP ratings while the 1700 is a 65W.
AMD disclosed some of the tech that goes into its Ryzen CPUs. A number of sensors embedded into the fabric of each CPU die report heat and power data constantly, and can detect how effective the cooler in use is. If there is enough thermal headroom, Ryzen CPUs can push their boost clocks even beyond the rated spec, on the fly and without any user intervention. The frequency can be stepped up or down in 25MHz increments rather than 100MHz, allowing for quicker and more fine-grained power management. Efficiency gains are also realised though a new "neural net" which learns what kinds of workloads are being processed, and uses that to improve branch prediction and cache access.
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