Ahead of the Computex PC electronics conference, AMD held its keynote to announce its highly anticipated Ryzen 3000 series processor. AMD led off the conference with its keynote, which was presented by the company’s CEO, Dr. Lisa Su.
Here’s everything you need to know about how to watch it.
How to watch
The presentation was held the morning before Computex officially kicks off, at 10 a.m. Monday, May 27, in Taipei. Fortunately, you don’t have to be in Taiwan to watch as the entire presentation was livestreamed.
Here in the states, the keynote started at 7 p.m. PT on Sunday, May 26, or 10 p.m. ET.
The entire livestream is embedded above.
What to expect
First and foremost, we expect AMD to fully unveil the company’s 3rd generation Ryzen CPUs, and the accompanying Radeon Navi graphics cards, which the company teased at CES 2019. While the benchmarks debuted at the time suggest that it will be a formidable contender to Intel’s powerhouse processors, the exact specs for the Ryzen 3000 series are hard to pin down.
The first reliable glimpse of the Ryzen 3000 line, and what kind of base specs it will offer, came shortly after AMD’s tease of the chip at CES 2019. At that point, the preview Ryzen 3000 model the company showed off, built according to their Zen 2 architecture and with 7nm manufacturing, demonstrated performance that was on par with Intel’s Core i9-9900K but with 30 percent less power consumption, and sporting PCIe 4.0 connectivity.
New leaks this week from Wccftech shed more light on the specs to expect from the 3rd generation desktop Ryzen line. So far, the 3000 series will feature at least two models, one with 12 cores and a lightning-fast 5.0 GHz clock speed without overclocking, and the other with 16 cores and 4.2 GHz.
A subsequent leak published by Wccftech also reveals some details on the new Radeon Navi GPUs that will eventually release with the Ryzen 3000 CPUs: The flagship Radeon Navi RX 3080 will bump the previous generation’s four shader engines to eight shader engines, each with 5 compute units.
Beyond these recently reported details, consumers have a lot less to go off of as to how the final launch portfolio for this year’s AMD CPUs will look. In March, speculations pointed to a 3rd generation lineup of at least five different models across a range of price points (from around $200 to almost $600) to offer more tiers, and thus more choice, to consumers than their 2nd generation predecessors. We also learned that the new CPUs would still conform to AMD’s favored AM4 socket, maintaining continuity and modularity with the 2000 series, and with the prospective 4000 series which the company has promised to build with AM4 sockets. Finally, rumors circulated about an ultra-high-end Threadripper line within the 3000 series due to be announced later in the year, after the base 3000 models hit the market.
A lot has changed on this front since March. To start the Threadripper variants of the Ryzen 3000 line initially slated for late 2019 appears to be in serious doubt, though its fate remains to be seen. It is also likely that the 3rd generation will include a wide array of options, with a Ryzen 3, Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7, packing six, eight, and twelve cores, respectively.
