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.
