AMD unveils the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X, at half the price of Intel’s competing Core i9 9920X chipset

Published May 27, 2019

AMD CEO Lisa Su gave the Computex keynote in Taipei today, the first time the company has been invited to do so (the event officially starts tomorrow). During the presentation, AMD unveiled news about its chips and graphics processors that will increase pressure on competitors Intel and Nvidia, both in terms of pricing and performance.

Chips

All new third-generation Ryzen CPUs, the first with 7-nanometer desktop chips, will go on sale on July 7. The showstopper of Su’s keynote was the announcement of AMD’s 12-core, 24-thread Ryzen 9 3900x chip, the flagship of its third-generation Ryzen family. It will retail starting at $499, half the price of Intel’s competing Core i9 9920X chipset, which is priced at $1,189 and up.

The 3900x has 4.6 Ghz boost speed and 70 MB of total cache and uses 105 watts of thermal design power (versus the i9 9920x’s 165 watts), making it more efficient. AMD says that in a Blender demo against Intel i9-9920x, the 3900x finished about 18 percent more quickly.

Here’s an exclusive #COMPUTEX2019 look at the newest edition to the Ryzen family, the 12 core/24 thread 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen 9 3900X processor. https://t.co/OgLHoqWv9T pic.twitter.com/75FzfpdiKx

— AMD Ryzen (@AMDRyzen) May 27, 2019

Starting prices for other chips in the family are $199 for the 6-core, 12-thread 3600; $329 for the 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 3700x (with 4.4 Ghz boost, 36 MB of total cache and a 65 watt TDP); and $399 for the 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 3800X (4.5 Ghz, 32MB cache, 105w).

GPUs

AMD also revealed that its first Navi graphics processor units will be the Radeon RX 5000 series. Pricing is being closely watched because it may pressure Nvidia to bring down prices on competing products. AMD announced that the GPUs will be available in July, but more details, including pricing, performance and new features, won’t be announced until E3 next month in Los Angeles.

Introducing the world’s first “Navi” gaming GPU family based on the all new RDNA gaming architecture: the AMD Radeon RX 5700 series. Learn more from #COMPUTEX2019: https://t.co/xwexmdDMin pic.twitter.com/rY2dAsq52l

— AMD (@AMD) May 27, 2019

Data processors

AMD announced that its EPYC Rome data center processors, first demoed at CES in January, will launch next quarter, one quarter earlier than previously anticipated, to compete with Intel’s Cascade Lake. AMD says that during a benchmark test, EPYC Rome performed twice as fast as Cascade Lake.

AMD CEO @LisaSu just gave the first public competitive demonstration of a 2nd Gen AMD #EPYC server platform outperforming the competition in a NAMD Apo1 v2.12 benchmark test by more than 2x. #COMPUTEX2019 https://t.co/ZHmrqBigjB pic.twitter.com/HQI5EPLmFf

— AMD EPYC (@AMDServer) May 27, 2019