AMD news: New Ryzen CPU confirmed for Q1 2018
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is not backing down from Intel's newest Coffee Lake processors, as the central processing unit (CPU) manufacturer has just announced the release date for the Ryzen 2 CPUs.
The Ryzen 2 architecture, which is a refresh of the Ryzen generation of CPUs released by AMD this year, is scheduled to arrive in March 2018. As such, the Ryzen 2 will have the same tiers as its previous iteration, which are the Ryzen 3, 5, and 7 2000 chips, but the upcoming versions will have better clock speeds and performance for the money. They will also have better overclocking capacity compared to the previous Ryzen.
Despite being a refresh of the Ryzen, the Ryzen 2 will have a smaller architecture, being only 12 nanometers (nm) transistors packed into a square of silicone. This is 2 nm smaller than that of the previous Ryzen chips. This means a lot more transistors could fit into the chip itself, leading to more processing power but possibly more heat as well.
Apart from the smaller size and better performance, the Ryzen 2 will also be featuring AMD's Zen + CPU architecture, which is a lot more efficient in power consumption than the previous Ryzen. This could compensate for the increased transistor count, offsetting the expected increase in temperatures. Ryzen 2 will also be utilizing improved support for double data rate (DDR) 4 memory running at higher frequencies.
Much like Intel's Coffee Lake name for its 8th-generation processors, AMD has also dubbed Ryzen 2 as Pinnacle Ridge processors. The most powerful tier, the Ryzen 7, is set to be released earlier in February next year, followed by the less powerful Ryzen 5 and 3 tiers come March. AMD not only wants to compete against Intel's Coffee Lake processors but also apparently against the upcoming Intel 9th-generation CPUs which are also expected to arrive during the second half of 2018.
AMD hopes that the standard eight cores of the Ryzen 2 and its projected out-of-the-box clock speeds of 4.4 gigahertz (GHz) would be enough to go toe-to-toe against Intel's CPUs.
