The rumours were true – AMD has indeed brought out three new 3000-series CPUs, which will do battle with Intel’s latest Comet Lake chips. The three new models are based on AMD’s Zen 2 micro architecture, and come in Ryzen 9, 7 and 5 versions.
The Ryzen 9 3900XT has 12 cores (24 threads), a base clock of 3.8GHz and a boost clock of up to 4.7GHz. As a point of comparison, its predecessor, the Ryzen 9 has the same number of cores, and 64MB of L3 cache, but its base and boost clocks are 100MHz lower.
Likewise, the Ryzen 7 3800XT and Ryzen 5 3600XT retain the respective 8-core and 6-core designs of their predecessors, but up the clock speed. The 3800XT boosts to up to 4.7GHz, compared to the 3800X’s maximum 4.5GHz boost.
Meanwhile, the Ryzen 5 3600XT has a 3.8GHz base clock and can boost up to 4.5GHz, while the Ryzen 5 3600X could only boost to up to 4.4GHz.
The specs aren’t massively different from the previous gaming CPUs, but the new processors are expected to be priced at the same level as the original X-branded chips, with the previous CPUs dropping in price. The XT CPUs will be available to buy from 7 July.