Ryzen gets a performance boost

The first generation of Ryzen processors hit the shelves last February and took the market by storm. AMD had given us, the PC users the option to seek high end computation gains at the fraction of the cost that the Intel counterparts were offering.

And now the second generation of Ryzen CPUs are also available. With the launch of the next generation, AMD is promising higher performance per core, and more efficiency thanks to the 12nm fabrication process that the new generation are adopting.

AMD is promising a 10 per cent performance boost. Owing to the adoption of the 12nm fabrication process itself throw in the fact that the new Ryzen CPUs also boast much higher stock core and boost clock speeds, and we may be looking at significant performance gains from the previous generation of processors.

The highlight of the Ryzen lineup, as mentioned was price to performance and AMD is not deviating from that philosophy. The new flagship CPU, the Ryzen 7 2700X, featuring a stock core clock of 3.9 GHz with a boost clock of 4.3 GHz, 8 physical cores with 16 virtual cores will retail in India for '24,500 + GST. That still comes out cheaper than Intel’s 8700K which is a 6 core/12 thread processor albeit with higher price.

Another thing for which AMD ought to be applauded is that the new CPUs will still be running the AM4 socket. So you don’t need to change your motherboards in case you are using the old Ryzen CPUs, just a BIOS update will suffice.

While AMD has been consistently dropping the ball in the GPU front, they seem to be doing quite well on the CPU front thanks to Ryzen and the trend looks set to continue.