Rumors about the next-generation of AMD's Ryzen CPUs have begun to surface and they look to be in line with the updated Threadripper range -- that is, they'll have a lot more cores and will subtly increase clock speeds to offer a nice bump in overall performance. The greatest advantage will be seen in multithreaded software settings though.
AMD's original line up of Ryzen processors shocked the world by dominating Intel in the multithreaded benchmarks and applications and offering far greater bang for buck in that regard. Its Ryzen+ generation has gone on to do much the same and while Intel has released chips with increased core counts, it's losing the value war across the performance spectrum. Ryzen 2 could well double down on that dominance if Intel can't bring its long-promised 10nm chips to bear.
Ryzen 2 is expected to debut in 2019 and will be 7nm chips -- the first CPUs of their kind in the commercial consumer space. While we don't know anything for sure about their specifications, new rumors published by WCCFTech point to a potential doubling of core counts throughout the range, with top-end Ryzen chips offering up to 16 cores and up to 15 percent more instructions per clock, which means if 4.0GHz+ frequencies can be maintained on all cores during operation, we could see a noticeable increase in performance in all scenarios. That also opens up huge potential for overclockers.
Indeed, we are expecting Ryzen 2 chips to improve frequencies too, potentially offering an extra few hundred megahertz than their predecessors, which if combined with the IPC improvements, could lead to some great gains over last-generation hardware.
Better yet, the socket will remain the same for this generation, so you don't have to buy a whole new motherboard and memory just for Ryzen 2. That makes it an even more attractive proposition and much more cost-effective.
