AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 27process wafers to build the IO dies.
The thousand-dollar question is whether
gaming—which has dogged Ryzen
performance from Day One—has finally been
erased in situations where the GPU is not the
limiting factor. We can say from what we’ve
seen that Ryzen 3000 doesn’t quite win all of
the time, but it’s so close now,
even with Nvidia’s brutally fast
RTX 2080 Ti driving it, that it
just won’t matter 99 percent
of the time.
PCIE 4.0?!
Yes, we said PCIe 4.0, which
is the next iteration of PCIe.
PCIe 4.0 essentially doubles
the clock speed and
throughput over PCIe 3.0.
AMD’s move to PCIe 4.0 is
another feather in
its cap, as Intel
continues to stick
with PCIe 3.0
speeds on its CPUs.
Nvidia, likewise,
“only” has PCIe
3.0–based GPUs.
While the actual
performance of
PCIe 4.0 outside of
SSDs today won’t
be easily realized,
the new standard
does help free up more lanes and more ports
elsewhere in the PC. If you want to take
advantage of PCIe 4.0 SSDs, AMD’s Ryzen
3000 and the new X570 chipset is the only
game in town.
You can read all about PCIe 4.0 in this
explainer (go.pcworld.com/pci4). If you’reAMD’s lineup of Ryzen 3000 seems poised to push Intel’s entire
lineup off the field of battle.The Ryzen 3000 features two 7nm CCDs, which feed into an IO die that has the
memory controller and PCIe controller.