AMD Ryzen 3rd Generation release date, news and rumors

AMD changed the world with its first Ryzen processors and impressed us even more with its sophomore release of CPUs. But, Ryzen 3rd Generation (aka Ryzen 3000) will introduce its first 7nm mainstream processors and even more profound change.

Considering Intel’s well-documented struggles to introduce 10nm Cannon Lake chips, AMD has swooped in and upstaged its rival completely even before it had a chance to launch Sunny Cove or Ice Lake, while also introducing some of the most impressive consumer processors ever made.

Cut to the chase

What is it? AMD’s next line of mainstream processors
When is it out? Mid 2019
What will it cost? TBD

AMD Ryzen 3000

AMD Ryzen 3rd Generation release date

At CES 2019, AMD announced its first Ryzen 3000-series processor will arrive some time in the middle of 2019. Unfortunately, the chipmaker didn't give us an exact date, but Ryzen 3rd Generation does seem to be releasing a little later than previous launches.

The first generation of Ryzen processors hit the market in March 2017 and Ryzen 2nd Generation arrived a month later in 2018. With that in mind, it's a bit surprising Ryzen 3000-series chips will be coming a bit later – our best guess is they'll arrive in May to July at the latest (we hope).

AMD Ryzen 3000

AMD Ryzen 3rd Generation price

AMD didn't announce any pricing information on its upcoming 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 3000-series processor so don’t have any empirical proof what it'll cost unfortunately.

However, thanks to a curiously detailed report from a YouTuber named AdoredTV, we have model names and prices for nearly every possible Ryzen 3rd Generation processor.

Here’s how much Ryzen 3rd Generation processors may cost:

Ryzen 9 3850X: $499 (about £400, AU$700)
Ryzen 9 3800X: $449 (about £350, AU$600)
Ryzen 7 3700X: $329 (about £260, AU$450)
Ryzen 7 3700: $299 (about £230, AU$400)
Ryzen 5 3600X: $229 (about £180, AU$320)
Ryzen 5 3600G: $199 (about £160, AU$270)
Ryzen 5 3600: $178 (about £140, AU$240)
Ryzen 3 3300X: $129 (about £100, AU$180)
Ryzen 3 3300G: $129 (about £100, AU$180)
Ryzen 3 3300: $99 (about £80, AU$140)

Although, this list of prices seems compelling and on track with the prices of AMD’s current lineup of Ryzen 2nd Generation processors, we would buy into them until Team Red officially announces prices.

Now what’s interesting here is AMD has a track record of lowering the prices of its processors going from Ryzen to Ryzen 2nd Generation. The AMD Ryzen 7 1700X originally launched with a $399 (£389, AU$569) price and it was succeeded by the more affordable $329 (£349, AU$515) AMD Ryzen 7 2700X.

With that in mind, we couldn’t imagine/would be disappointed if the Ryzen 7 3700X were to cost more. For now, it seems AMD will hold onto the same pricing scheme from its current slew of chips going into the next generation.

AMD Ryzen 3000

AMD Ryzen 3rd Generation specs

So far we only know of one Ryzen 3000-series processor and that is a 8-core and 16-thread chip designed to go toe-to-toe with Intel's flagship Core i9-9900K.

On its CES 2019 keynote stage, AMD On benchmarked its secretive processor with Cinebench to achieve a score of 2023. Comparatively the Intel Core i9-9900K and AMD Ryzen 7 2700X scored 1,873 and 1,798 points, respectively, in our own testing.

Even more impressively, AMD's new Ryzen 3000 chip seems to more power efficient than Intel's current Coffee Lake Refresh series. During its Cinebench demo, AMD also displayed the maximum power draw of the Intel system running at 179.9-watts (W) while the new Ryzen system maxed out at 133.4W.

Overall it seems that, Ryzen 3rd Generation's 7nm architecture affords it 12% more performance while making AMD chips about 30% more power efficient than Intel's latest 14nm CPU architecture.

This is all thanks to Ryzen 3rd Generation much smaller 7nm Zen 2 platform, which introduces a die shrink to eclipse all others that came before it. Previously, Ryzen 2nd Generation processors were built on a 12nm Zen+ architecture that introduced a slight die shrink from the original 14nm Zen architecture.

Despite being built on a new architecture, Ryzen 3000 CPUs will still fit into the AM4 socket used by Ryzen 2nd Generation and the original Ryzen processors. That said, Ryzen 3rd Generation is introducing something new with PCIe 4.0 support.

Before you get too excited about unlocking even more power from your Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 or AMD Radeon VII, PCIe 4.0 will only enhance your storage solutions for now.

AMD Ryzen 3000

Aside from the single unnamed processor AMD introduced, we've also seen a multitude of leaks that have pretty much outlined what Ryzen 3rd Generation processors there will be and they are as follows:

Ryzen 9 3850X: 16-cores, 32-threads, clocked at 4.3GHz to 5.1GHz
Ryzen 9 3800X: 16-cores, 32-threads, clocked at 3.9GHz to 4.7GHz
Ryzen 7 3700X: 12-cores, 24-threads, clocked at 4.2GHz to 5.0GHz
Ryzen 7 3700: 12-cores, 24-threads, clocked at 3.8GHz to 4.6GHz
Ryzen 5 3600X: 8-cores, 16-threads, clocked at 4.0GHz to 4.8GHz
Ryzen 5 3600G: 8-cores, 16-threads, 12 GPU cores, clocked at 3.2GHz to 4.0GHz
Ryzen 5 3600: 8-cores, 16-threads, clocked at 3.6GHz to 4.4GHz
Ryzen 3 3300X: 6-cores,12 -threads, clocked at 3.5GHz to 4.3GHz
Ryzen 3 3300G: 8-core, 12-thread, 12 GPU cores, clocked at 3.2GHz to 4.0GHz
Ryzen 3 3300: 6-cores, 12-threads, clocked at 3.2GHz to 4.0GHz

We heard the first murmurs of what Zen 2 processors could do as early as October 2018. In the report suggested that AMD Radeon Technologies Group received its first engineering sample for the unreleased architecture in the form of an 8-core chip capable of reaching frequencies up to 4.5GHz. Whether this rumored processor and the one AMD officially announced are one and the same remains to be seen.

In December 2018, the rumors began to really head up as we received an almost complete breakdown of this new series of CPUs. This nearly complete set of listings came from a YouTuber named AdoredTV and while they seemed unlikely to be true, a Russian retailer would later back up the influencer’s report with nearly identical specs on all its product pages for the whole series of chips.

We’re not sure if the Russian retailer was just cribbing AdoredTV’s video like a cheat sheet, but so far no other rumors or reports have contradicted what we know so far. In fact, notorious leaker Tum Apisak revealed a leaked UserBenchmark entry for a 12-core, 24-thread Ryzen 3000 processor. This leaked processor didn’t have any kind of product name attached to it, but it’s still exciting.

This is all we know so far, but we’re certain that AMD will show off the specifics of Ryzen 3rd Generation later in the year.