AMD’s Ryzen 9 3000 series of CPUs, as apart of the Zen 2 family, was massive success, especially for gaming rigs. At E3, AMD revealed AMD Ryzen 9 3950x which was a massive hit with its 16 cores and 36 threads. The CPU finalized AMD usurping of Intel’s dominance in the gaming sphere selling 40% more than Intel. AMD has shifted its focus onto Zen 3 technology, which is expected to follow a similar release schedule as the previous generation.
Zen 3 is expected to improve on the 7nm CPU design pioneered with Zen 2. AMD is expected to keep improving the 7nm designs as Intel is primarily using 12nm and just started release 10nm designs. Zen is expected to release late 2020, into 2021. AMD is finishing off their roadmap with Zen 4 in 2022 and is expecting to get to 5nm designed chips. AMD is yet to reveal the whole family for the Zen 3 line up, but they did reveal Ryzen 9 4900H and 4900HS, both are APUs (accelerated processing units).
An APU both acts as a CPU and GPU removing the need for a dedicated graphics card. APUs are preferred for laptops as they conserve vital space. Ryzen 9 4900H and the Ryzen 9 4900HS, which are built for 45W and 35W operations respectively. They are designed to compete with Intel’s i9 mobile processors. The APUs outperformed Intel’s Core i9-9880H by 28% in the Cinebench R20 benchmark, 23% on video transcoding, 56% on image rendering and 32% on audio encoding, but the numbers are based on AMD metrics.
Independent benchmark tests began appearing on the APUs. Early figures suggest that the APUs were capable of outperforming the strongest of ZEN 2 CPUs. The APUs outperformed one of AMD’s best CPU on the field, AMD Ryzen 9 3950x, all the while consuming less power. The benchmark is aware of a margin of error in the limited tests and in a few cases, the AMD Ryzen 9 3950x did do better.
AMD is yet to reveal all of the Zen 3 family, including desktop CPUs. AMD is releasing a 64 core CPU, the Threadripper 3990x, a CPU that shares more with server CPUs and boards over a normal desktop. The Threadripper 3990x is one of the best-performing CPUs but is designed for heavier workloads than gaming such as animation for films. If the Threadripper 3990x did not solidify AMD lead again over Intel for 2020 going into 2021, Zen 3 and the next generation of CPUs to aim to do that.