Trays Of AMD Ryzen Processors Break Cover In Final Production Form

Folks, we don’t have much longer to wait until AMD officially announces its entire lineup of Ryzen processors. But just like a kid taking a sneak peek at gifts under the tree before Christmas, we can’t help but attempt to lay eyes on AMD’s highly-anticipated counter to Intel’s “Core” dominance in the enthusiast market.

Today, we’re getting a look at what appears to be a few trays of production processors, complete with the final heat spreader design and an emblazoned “RYZEN” logo. The image of the production Ryzen processors can be compared to recent engineering samples (seen below).

If you need a refresher, Ryzen processors are built on AMD’s Zen microarchitecture, which is manufactured on a 14nm FinFET process. AMD is expected to provide 17 SKUs at launch in three distinct product families: Ryzen R4, R5 and R7. All processors in the Ryzen R3 family feature four cores (operating at speeds ranging from 3.1GHz to 3.4GHz), and can execute four threads:

• R3 1200X: 4 cores, 4 threads
• R3 Pro 1200: 4 cores, 4 threads
• R3 1100: 4 cores, 4 threads
• R3 Pro 1100: 4 cores, 4 threads

The mid-level Ryzen R5 family contains a mixture of quad-core and hexa-core parts (operating at 3.2GHz to 3.5GHz). The quad-core SKUs have eight threads, while the hexa-core SKUs have twelve threads:

• R5 1600X: 6 cores, 12 threads
• R5 Pro 1600: 6 cores, 12 threads
• R5 1500: 6 cores, 12 threads
• R5 Pro 1500: 6 cores, 12 threads
• R5 1400X: 4 cores, 8 threads
• R5 Pro 1400: 4 cores, 8 threads
• R5 1300: 4 cores, 8 threads
• R5 Pro 1300: 4 cores, 8 threads

At the top of the totem pole is the Ryzen R7 family, all of which have eight cores and sixteen threads ranging in speed from 3GHz to 3.6GHz. The most potent of these chips will be the Ryzen R7 1800X, which will be positioned directly against Intel’s Core i7-6900K.

• R7 1800X: 8 cores, 16 threads
• R7 Pro 1800: 8 cores, 16 threads
• R7 1700X: 8 cores, 16 threads
• R7 1700: 8 cores, 16 threads
• R7 Pro 1700: 8 cores, 16 threads

As for pricing, you can see how the new Ryzen family is expected to fair against the competition from Intel in the chart below.

Intel should be more than a bit worried at the expected performance from Ryzen. If early benchmarks that we have seen can be taken as fact, AMD is going to be offering up comparable performance to Intel’s Skylake- and Kaby Lake-based processors with discounts measured in hundreds of dollars.