AMD Ryzen 7 2700X

It’s semi-shrunk, but is it truly second gen?

- Jeremy Laird

AMD’S RYZEN was a very long time coming. So much so, some industry observers worried whether AMD would survive long enough to bring it to market. But AMD did, and here we are just over a year later. In the meantime, the original Ryzen CPU family inserted a flying nocturnal insectivore up the metaphorical nightdress of the PC processor market. And now we have AMD’s second-generation Ryzen processor in hand. AMD is back, and it’s all for the better, even if you don’t buy an AMD CPU.

It’s arguably a stretch to characterize the Ryzen 7 2700X chip as truly second gen. Architecturally, the narrative involves Zen+ while previous Ryzens were Zen. But there are no changes to the physical design, no new features, no additional cores, no added PCI Express lanes, no increased cache memory, nothing. This chip is all about changes to the production process, plus a few firmware tweaks.