Intel has released its 10th Gen Comet Lake desktop CPUs recently and has taken back the title of best “CPU for gaming”. However, one might argue that AMD’s Zen 2 chips offer an overall better value but the truth is the clocks are not in AMD’s favor.
AMD would want to finally settle the scores of being the ‘best CPU’ on the market period. And they might be releasing the Zen 2 “Matisse refresh” to address the frequency problem. Given that AMD already has the IPC advantage with the Zen 2, they need to only push the clocks a bit higher to achieve parity with Intel.
Hot on Intel’s Heels – Meet the Ryzen XT Processors
AMD’s road map has Zen 3 ready for the end of 2020 so this release will most probably act as a buffer for Zen 3’s launch. It will also make Intel’s 10th Gen completely irrelevant more than what it already is. Since the 1st and 2nd gen Ryzen could not reach higher clocks AMD decided to move to TSMC and it might finally pay off.
If AMD prices the new ‘XT’ variant of their Zen 2 offering just right preferably at what the Zen 2 originally retailed for, it would spell doom for Intel. We can expect a bump to both the base and boost clocks by 100MHz and 300MHz respectively. It will most likely still retain the same core count as its non-XT counterpart and also similar TDP.
Thanks to Wcctech and this twitter user we got ourselves this new leak. Although the twitter user had a different naming scheme for the new chips.
The Matisse refresh will probably be announced officially along with the Ryzen 4000 series Renoir APUs on the 16th of June and a formal release on 7th July. But we don’t know if both the new CPUs and APUs will share the same release date.
But as always take this with a grain of salt as similar rumors popped up during the Ryzen 2800X release contemplating an ‘imminent’ 2900 release. Which of course never materialized, so this release might also share the same fate.