We're now one year on from the release of AMD's first game-changing Ryzen CPUs and attention is now very firmly on the range's first refresh. Likely to be sold under the 2000-series banner, potentially alongside an updated motherboard range, they should entail comprehensive like-for-like replacements of the Ryzen 1000-series from four to eight cores in the AM4 socket.

Of course, ahead of any new product release we're very likely to see more than the odd leak, giving some indication of its specs at least. Such is the case this week as Computerbase.de have uncovered details of the performance-class Ryzen 7 2700X - a replacement for the R7 1700X - paired with ASRock's Taichi X370 motherboard.



The new chip - another 8-core, 16-thread part on the AM4 socket - starts with a base clock of 3.7GHz, and dynamically clocks up to a zippy ~4.1GHz or 4.2GHz under heavy single-core load using XFR (which for the 2000-series has been updated to XFR 2.0). It's not clear whether 4.1 or 4.2GHz is to be the specs of the retail chip, but at 4.1GHz they represent a 300MHz increase over the Ryzen 7 1700X in base and XFR clocks.

Since launch the Ryzen 7 1700X garnered a reputation as being excellent bang for your buck even among the generally cost-efficient Ryzen series. Whether the same can be said for its replacement remains to be seen, but out of the box performance should see significant step forward.

AMD's Ryzen 2000-series is to be manufactured using a new 12nm process, and integrates other improvements into the range such as Performance Boost 2 and XFR 2.0. Thanks to the process shrink the CPUs should be a touch more power-efficient than those they replace, leading to higher clock speeds in the same TDP envelope. Recently a leak of Ryzen 5 2600 Geekbench scores boasted 15% performance increases versus the R5 1600, but that should likely be taken with a hefty pinch of salt.

SOURCE: Computerbase.de via Videocardz.com