We’ve just discovered that the successor to AMD’s freshly revealed Ryzen chips is expected to be unleashed in early 2018, and the company has already been talking about the sort of performance gains we can expect to see.
Lisa Su, chief executive of AMD, revealed details of what she called the Zen 2 (codenamed Pinnacle Ridge) and Zen 3 processors – the next-generation, and the one after that – in a Reddit ‘ask me anything’ session.
AMD will be concentrating on boosting up the IPC (instructions per clock) for these upcoming CPUs, and we can apparently expect performance improvements of around 5% to 15% with both incarnations.
Those are fairly modest gains, but that’s only to be expected when it comes to refining Ryzen – which itself was a massive jump in terms of performance (over 50% compared to last-gen AMD processors) because it was built from the ground-up.
Actual real-world gains in terms of frame-rates may well be greater, as well, when you consider further improvements will likely be made in terms of optimization for games (currently Ryzen isn’t performing as well as it could in 1080p for many titles), plus improved compatibility with faster DDR4 RAM, and doubtless other things besides.
As Wccftech reports, Su stated: “In new product development, you always learn a lot and we have our list of things that we are adding to Zen 2 and Zen 3 to get even more performance going forward.”
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1080p woes
On the topic of disappointment regarding Ryzen’s 1080p performance, Su has previously said: “In 1080p, we have tested over 100+ titles in the labs… And depending on the test conditions, we do better in some games and worse in others.
“We hear people on wanting to see improved 1080p performance and we fully expect that Ryzen performance in 1080p will only get better as developers get more time with Zen. We have over 300+ developers now working with Zen and several of the developers for Ashes of Singularity and Total Warhammer are actively optimizing now.”
As you’ve no doubt seen, Ryzen 7 processors are available now (although stock is thin on the ground), with the midrange Ryzen 5 series due in the next couple of months, and budget Ryzen 3 CPUs are expected to land in the second half of 2017.
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