AMD Ryzen 7 1800X

The Red Wedding

- Zak Storey

RYZEN HAS BEEN IN DEVELOPMENT for six long, arduous years, hand-crafted by the grand master architect himself, Jim Keller, and perfected by AMD’s crack team of engineers. And since 2011, as AMD has had to weather Intel’s aggressive, yet incrementally dull, Core-series storm, Ryzen has endured, flourished even, waiting to be unleashed. It’s hard to deny how much hype Zen has generated, with many hoping and praying that it would shake up the market, and unseat Intel from its perch of pride. So, has it met our expectations? And is it worthy of the hype?

The AMD Ryzen 7 1800X is an eight-core, 16-thread, 14nm behemoth of a processor. Each core sports 64KB of L1 cache, followed by 512KB of L2 cache, and 8MB of L3 cache shared between each set of four cores, giving each R7 series chip a combined total of 16MB of L3. That last part is important: Instead of allocating 2MB to each core, the cache is shared across each set of four, so the processor can allocate memory to each core depending on how much it needs, without having to store that additional data externally in the memory itself.