Ryzen Cpus Explained: Everything You Need To Know About AMD's Disruptive Multicore Chips

AFTER A DECADE of fielding ho-hum FX-series processors, AMD’s finally released its highly disruptive Ryzen chips, throwing down the gauntlet and challenging Intel’s supremacy in high-end computing.

- Brad Chacos

AMD’s new Ryzen chips include several CPUs (and CPU families) of various levels of potency. What’s more, Ryzen introduces a completely new motherboard platform, and the processors require different memory and coolers than their predecessors. There’s a lot to sift through—so let’s sift!

Here’s everything you need to know about AMD’s Ryzen.

Meet AMD’s Ryzen CPUs

Let’s begin with the stars of the show: the Ryzen chips themselves. AMD’s Ryzen chips will be split across three families. The top-of-the-line Ryzen 7 processors launched first, with 8 cores, 16 threads, and price points that undercut the comparable 8-core Intel Extreme Edition by a whopping $500. Sweet holy moly. The initial Ryzen 7 lineup consists of the $500 Ryzen 7 1800X, the $400 Ryzen 7 1700X, and the $330 Ryzen 7 1700.

The more affordable Ryzen 5 series (go.pcworld.com/ryz5price) launched on April 11 with more variation among processors than you’ll find in the 7 series. The $249 Ryzen 5 1600X is a 6-core, 12-thread processor capable of boosting to 4GHz, the same max speed as the Ryzen 7 1800X. The $219 Ryzen 5 1600 is a 6-core, 12-thread chip that tops out at 3.6GHz. The rest of the Ryzen 5 lineup consists of quad-core, 8-thread CPUs, with the $189 Ryzen 5 1500X hitting 3.7GHz with boost and the $169 Ryzen 5 1400 hanging between 3.2GHz and 3.4GHz.

Finally, the only thing AMD’s said about the more affordable Ryzen 3 chips is that they’ll launch at some point in the second half of the year. We’d expect these to challenge Intel’s Core i3 lineup.

Ryzen technologies

 AMD imbued Ryzen chips with SenseMI technology (go.pcworld.coms/ sensmi) consisting of separate parts: Pure Power, Precision Boost, Extended Frequency Range (XFR), Neural Net Prediction, and Smart Prefetch.