JULY 2019 PCWorld 9The other half of that comes from the
CPU’s cache. With Ryzen 3000 chips, the L
cache basically gets doubled in size. For
example, the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X featurescore’s innards, adding a new front-end with
improved branch predictor, better instruction
pre-fetching, and larger caches. The 7nm Zen
2 cores basically feature double the floating
point performance over
12nm Zen+ cores,
yielding a 25-percent
increase in performance
for the same power as
the Zen+ chip.
AMD has also
worked hard to address
one of the issues it’s
had with memory
latency. By moving from
DDR4/2667 to
DDR4/3600, many
games yield up to
double-digit
performance bumps.
AMD said despite the difficulty of increasing clock speeds as you shrink chips, it has successfully done so
for its 7nm chips.
AMD said the Zen 2 cores yield a 21 percent performance increase
over the Zen+ cores with roughly 40 percent of that coming from the
process and 60 percent of it from IPC improvements.