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takyon writes:

Four of AMD's second-generation Ryzen CPUs have been released. These are "12nm Zen+" chips with minor changes, rather than the more significant third-generation "7nm Zen 2" chips coming later.

The CPUs are the 8-core Ryzen 7 2700X ($329) and Ryzen 7 2700 ($299), and the 6-core Ryzen 5 2600X ($229) and Ryzen 5 2600 ($199). All four come with a bundled cooler, 2 threads per core, and support DDR4-2933 memory, up from DDR4-2666.

The Ryzen 7 2700X takes over the top spot from the Ryzen 7 1800X, and for an extra 10 W in TDP will provide a base frequency of 3.7 GHz and a turbo frequency of 4.3 GHz on its eight cores, with simultaneous multi-threading. This is an extra +100 MHz and +300 MHz respectively, going above the average limits of the 1800X when overclocked.

The 2700X also reduces the top cost for the best AM4 Ryzen processor: when launched, the 1800X was set at $499, without a bundled cooler, and was recently dropped to $349 as a price-competitor to Intel's most powerful mainstream processor. The 2700X undercuts both, by being listed at a suggested e-tail price of $329, and is bundled with the best stock cooler in the business: AMD's Wraith Prism RGB. AMD is attempting to hit all the targets: aggressive pricing, top performance, and best value, all in one go.

IPC is improved about 3% due to cache latency improvements, clock speeds are up about 6% (die sizes and transistor counts are similar to the previous generation, but more unused silicon is used as a thermal buffer), and Precision Boost 2 / XFR 2 is used, for a total of about 10% better performance.

Also at Tom's Hardware and PC World.

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