AMD have today released the Radeon RX 5700 series GPUs and the Ryzen 3000 series CPUs

The world of 7nm is here, as AMD have today released their new GPU and CPU series with the Radeon RX 5700 and Ryzen 3000.

“We are proud to deliver our newest AMD Radeon graphics cards and AMD Ryzen processor products to create the ultimate PC gaming platform with leadership performance at every price point,” said Dr. Lisa Su, President and CEO, AMD. “AMD is committed to driving innovation and competition across the computing and graphics markets to give PC enthusiasts, gamers and creators incredible experiences and unmatched value.”

AMD's new Radeon RX 5700 series is the first to use their new "RDNA" architecture, which AMD claim will provide up to "1.25x" higher performance per clock and up to "1.5x" higher performance per watt versus the older Graphic Core Next (GCN) architecture. For the new GPU it comes in three editions:

• 50th Anniversary Edition Radeon RX 5700 XT - $449
  • 40 compute units, 2,560 stream processors, 8GB GDDR6
  • Base clock: 1,680MHz, Game Clock: 1,830MHz, Boost Clock: "up to" 1,980MHz
• Radeon RX 5700 XT - $399
  • 40 compute units, 2,560 stream processors, 8GB GDDR6
  • Base clock: 1,605MHz, Game Clock: 1,755MHz, Boost Clock: "up to" 1,905MHz
• Radeon RX 5700 - $349
  • 36 compute units, 2,304 stream processors, 8GB GDDR6
  • Base clock: 1,465MHz, Game Clock: 1,625MHz, Boost Clock: "up to" 1,725MHz

It may be a little confusing, with them now advertising three different possible speeds. The Base Clock is the minimum level you would expect it to run at, with the Game Clock being around where you would expect it to be whilst gaming and the Boost Clock is supposed to be the max. However, AMD is apparently being quite conservative with it so you might see it go higher.

AMD also released the "Radeon Software for Linux" 19.30 driver today to add in support for the new series. Although they only list "Ubuntu 18.04.2" as being compatible with it. For the Mesa drivers, you're likely going to need the latest code which will make up Mesa 19.2 that's scheduled to release next month.

On the CPU side, things are just as exciting with two sets of CPUs. These arrived with the new X570 chipset for AMD Socket AM4. The first are their higher-end main desktop Zen 2 processors:

• Ryzen 9 3900X - $499
  • 12 cores/24 threads - TDP: 105w - 4.6GHz boost/3.8GHz base
• Ryzen 7 3800X - $399
  • 8 core/16 threads - TDP: 105w - 4.5GHz boost/3.9GHz base
• Ryzen 7 3700X - $329
  • 8 cores/16 threads - TDP: 65w - 4.4GHz boost/3.6GHz base
• Ryzen 5 3600X - $249
  • 6 cores/12 threads - TDP: 95w - 4.4GHz boost/3.8GHz base
• Ryzen 5 3600 - $199
  • 6 cores/12 threads - TDP 65w - 4.2GHz boost/3.6GHz base

There's also the Ryzen 9 3950X with 16 cores and 32 threads, which is not launching until September.

For those looking for a processor with integrated graphics, they also launched these two still on Zen+:

• Ryzen 5 3400G - $149
  • 4 cores/8 threads - TDP: 65w - 4.2GHz boost/3.7GHz base
  • Radeon RX Vega 11 (1400 MHz)
• Ryzen 3 3200G - $99
  • 4 cores/4 threads - TDP: 65w - 4.0GHz boost/3.6GHz base
  • Radeon Vega 8 (1250 MHz)

If you're looking to grab one of the new Ryzen 3xxx series, you might want to keep in mind what Phoronix discovered, with newer Linux distributions failing to boot which is a big ouch. However, they seem to work fine with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and other older distributions.

Aside from the usual teething issues with new hardware, it's really great to see AMD offer some solid competition to both NVIDIA and Intel! It's looking like an all-AMD box could be really great for gaming offering both good performance and pretty good prices too.

Additionally, AMD released version 3.0 of AMD uProf, a performance analysis tool that works on Linux. This latest version adds support for 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen, more Linux distributions supported like openSUSE Leap 15 and SLES 12 & 15. On top of that it also now supports Linux kernel profiling and kernel-space drivers and more.

Sorry for the delay, AMD decided at some point to stop sending us press releases.