Motherboard maker ASRock has a history of prematurely spilling the beans about hot new hardware, and it’s at it again. An update to the compatibility chart for the company’s AB350M Pro4 motherboard lists the names and basic specification details for four unannounced 2nd-gen Ryzen processors.
The new Ryzen chip listings were first spotted by Tech Report and span the Ryzen 3, Ryzen 5, and Ryzen 7 lineups. Here are the details ASRock provided on the new chips:
- Ryzen 3 2300X: 3.5GHz base clock, 65W, 2MB L2 cache
- Ryzen 5 2500X: 3.6GHz base clock, 65W, 2MB L2 cache
- Ryzen 5 2600E: 3.1GHz base clock, 45W, 3MB L2 cache
- Ryzen 7 2700E: 2.8GHz base clock, 45W, 4MB L2 cache
They’ll join the 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 2700X and 2700 CPUs, the 6-core, 12-thread Ryzen 5 2600X and 2600, and two quad-core APUs with Radeon Vega graphics in the 2nd-gen Ryzen family.
Given the makeup of the currently available chips, and the partitioning AMD used for the first-gen processors, and the fact that each Zen core includes 512KB of L2 cache, we’d guess that the Ryzen 3 2300X is a quad-core chip without simultaneous multi-threading, and the Ryzen 5 2500X is a quad-core chip with simultaneous multi-threading, bringing its thread total up to eight. Second-gen Ryzen chips can get a significant performance uplift from AMD’s Precision Boost 2, so it’s impossible to tell how fast these unannounced processors can run without knowing their boost clock speeds. Expect these chips to target gamers on a lower budget like their first-gen predecessors.
[ Further reading: The best CPUs for gaming ]
The Ryzen 5 2600E and Ryzen 7 2700E look like more power-efficient versions of the 2nd-gen chips already available, presumably targeting makers of small form factor (and maybe even fanless) computers.
Again, AMD hasn’t formally announced any of these parts. But with the huge Computex trade show kicking off next week, we might not need to wait long to hear more about them. PCWorld will be on the ground in Taipei so stay tuned.