New AMD CPU

The second-generation AMD Ryzen desktop processors

are open for preorders today. Shipping on April 19th, the

new chips start at $199 for a six-core, 12-thread part running

at a base of 3.4GHz and a turbo of 3.9GHz; the prices goes

up to $329 for an eight-core, 16-thread processor at 3.7/4.3GHz.

Details on the new chips are a little light, with the full

reveal, including performance numbers, coming on release

day. We know that the second-generation processors are

an incremental improvement over the first-generation Zen

architecture. They keep the same basic layout—groups of

four cores/eight threads are arranged into "core complexes"

(CCXes), and a Ryzen chip has two CCXes joined together.

Each core has 512KB of level 2 and 2MB of level 3 cache.

The second generation increases clock speeds (the previous

high-end part had clocks of 3.6/4.0GHz) and makes the

processor's turbo boosting smarter. On first-generation parts,

the clock boosting could happen to a pair of cores, or all cores

together. This meant that if you needed, say, four fast cores,

they were constrained to the "all core" turbo speed. On the

second-generation chips, that turbo boosting is now available

with any number of cores, just as long as there's power and

thermal headroom. Workloads with more than two cores, but

fewer than all of them, should be able to use more of the

available power budget and hence run faster.

The new processors are compatible with the first-generation

motherboards (though they may need a firmware update to work).

AMD is also releasing a new high-end chipset, X470. X470's

big feature is "StoreMI," a hybrid disk system that allows volumes

to be built that span both SSDs and spinning disks (and even

RAM disks) to boost I/O performance.