The Ryzen Line-Up
Let’s cover the basics: What processors are going to be available under AMD’s new architecture?
RYZEN 3
Due to be released during the second half of this year are AMD’s “budget” chips—relatively speaking, of course. Expecting to come in fourcore variants, these low-power processors should be aimed at office workstations and HTPCs, with budget gaming also on the cards. Note: The figures below are entirely speculative.
RYZEN 5
It’s hard to miss the fact that Ryzen’s 5 series of processor is aiming its sights directly at the Intel Core i5 market. With its top-end chip topping out at six cores, 12 threads, and a whole whack of cache, this should be a good choice for any mainstream gamer going forward. And with AMD tactically holding these cores back until sufficient OS optimization has occurred, it means those after a competitive gaming chip should see some solid performance, as opposed to the fragmented 1080p performance experienced by Ryzen 7.
RYZEN 7
We’ve covered Ryzen’s launch line of octo-core mainstream processors at length already. These eight-core, multithreaded rendering titans smash the competition on price to performance, although the chipset is somewhat weaker than both Z270 and X99 in comparison. Ryzen 7 has revolutionized the marketplace for the better—whether you’re team red or blue, it’s hard to deny just how huge a difference these chips are going to make.
ARCHITECTURE DESIGN
Down to the nitty-gritty. What makes Ryzen tick? How does it work? What’s new? And what can users look forward to in the future? Back in 2011, AMD realized it was on the back foot with chip design, so it went back to the drawing board, drafting in the legendary Jim Keller to set out the groundwork for the chip’s architecture.
CORE DESIGN
Analyzing the Ryzen 7 1800X, we can split it down on a core by core basis. Each Ryzen 7 CPU comes with eight cores in total. Each core comes with 32KB of D-cache (where the CPU stores data string load and store requests after processing), and 64KB of I-cache (where the CPU stores its instructions drawn from programs), commonly known together as the L1 cache. Additionally, each core has a block of 512KB of slightly slower L2 cache, which can be used to store both data and instruction sets simultaneously. On top of that, each core has four integer units, with 42 registers apiece, six schedulers, four ALUs, and two AGUs. Separate from the Integer Units, there are also two Floating Point Units, 72 out-of-order load supports, and, of course, two threads per core. Scale that up, and each block of four cores has a shared L3 cache of 8MB apiece, leading to a combined total of 16MB of L3 cache, and 4MB of L1/L2 cache for each and every eight-core processor—plus, of course, 16 threads via AMD’s SMT.