AMD Ryzen 9 3950X announced – with 16 cores from dream to reality

AMD CEO Lisa Su recently announced the new Ryzen 3000 series at Computex 2019, but left a single, official announcement for the Next Horizon Gaming Tech Day in Los Angeles: that of the Ryzen 9 3950X with 16 cores (32 threads) for an EIA of 749 USD. This new processor will hit the shelves in September and there were also other details about the new architecture and chipset.

The Ryzen 9 3950X surpasses Intel's Core i9-9900K with 8 cores (16 threads) on the mainstream desktop, at least in terms of core number. And with Intel's next-generation Comet Lake series seeming to come with a maximum of ten cores, it looks like AMD will be able to retain that advantage for some time to come. AMD has already said that the Ryzen 3000 series offers almost the same gaming performance as Intel's CPUs, and adding eight more cores and sixteen threads could allow it to steal Intel's power crown on the mainstream desktop for the first time in many years, especially in busy parallelizable applications such as game streaming.

The Ryzen 9 3950X features all the features of the new AMD architecture, including a 15% increased IPC boost resulting from the Zen 2 microarchitecture. The whole thing is combined with an impressive boost frequency of 4.7 GHz, the highest of the Ryzen 3000 series. The Ryzen 9 3950X features two chiplets connected by AMD's Infinity Fabric and an I/O die.

AMD did not specify how many of the cores of the 3950X can actually clock to 4.7 GHz at the end, and if the chip matches the known standard boost behavior we see in the current mainstream ryzen models, the boost is applied to a maximum of two cores. But there may also be the possibility of a quad-core boost, just like the Dual-The Threadripper models, which can raise two cores per chiplet.

The 3950X's 3950X base frequency, even though it's the lowest in the Ryzen 3000 family, is still impressive, as Intel's 1,700-dollar Core i9-9960X has a base clock of 3.1 GHz and 4.4 GHz boost frequency, but requires an expensive HEDT setup to record the chip at all.

AMD's 105W TDP rating is also an important factor. AMD and Intel specify their TDP ratings in completely different ways, with Intel measuring the TDP at base clock frequencies, which often results in an undervalued number because the power consumption is much higher when the processor is in high-performance states. Here, AMD seems to use the clearer metric, which is based on the full use of the chip in its entire dynamic range. In short, this means that the Ryzen 9 3950X could be an incredibly energy efficient chip. Thus, cooling should be a relatively simple task and there could be plenty of room for overclocking of the soldered chip.

Like the other Ryzen 3000 series models, the 3950X PCIe 4.0 will be fully supportive and will be able to run with some limitations on older socket AM4 motherboards.

In addition to amD's performance improvement in the 7nm manufacturing process, the company has adapted the second-generation Zen architecture to a number of common workloads, such as gaming to give a great performance boost. AMD's doubling of the L3 cache per chiplet results in a massive 72MB L3 cache for the 3950X. This larger cache increases the amount of data that the processor can hold close to the execution units, thereby defusing the latency effects of memory access.

AMD has also implemented a number of other enhancements to boost gaming performance, but many are still subject to an NDA, so there will certainly be more information soon.

Source: Tom's Hardware (Paul Alcorn)