In brief...

AMD’s first processors based on the new Zen architecture, the successor to the aging Piledriver series, are finally here. With a heady 52.1% increase in instructions per clock (IPC) and XFR frequencyboosting, there’s a lot of potential here. The first to hit the market are the enthusiast level Ryzen 7 series. We tested the most expensive one, the 8-core 16-thread 1800X.