Ryzen

Ryzen is a brand of multi-core x86-64 microprocessors designed and marketed by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) for desktop, mobile, server, and embedded platforms based on the Zen microarchitecture. It consists of central processing units (CPUs) marketed for mainstream, enthusiast, server, and workstation segments and accelerated processing units (APUs) marketed for mainstream and entry-level segments and embedded systems applications.

AMD officially announced a new series of processors, named "Ryzen", during its New Horizon summit on December 13, 2016 and introduced Ryzen 1000 series processors in February 2017 featuring up to eight cores and 16 threads with a 52% Instructions per cycle (IPC) increase over their prior CPU products, which launched on March 2, 2017. The second generation of Ryzen processors, the Ryzen 2000 series, features the Zen+ microarchitecture, an incremental improvement built on a 12 nm process technology from GlobalFoundries that was released in April 2018 and featured an average 10% total aggregate performance increase (≈3% IPC, 6% frequency, 10% overall) over Ryzen 1000 processors that first released in 2017. Most importantly though, Zen+ significantly improved cache and memory latencies, which were a major weak point of the original Zen design; leading to some particularly latency sensitive workloads having IPC gains of nearly ≈10%. The third generation of Ryzen processors launched on July 7, 2019 and based on AMD's Zen 2 architecture, features more significant design improvements with a 15% average IPC boost, a doubling of floating point capability to a full 256 bit wide execution datapath much like Intel's Haswell microarchitecture released in 2014 as well as a shift to an MCM style "chiplet" based package design, and a further shrink to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC) 7 nm fabrication process. On June 16, 2020, AMD announced new Ryzen 3000 series XT processors with 4% higher boost clocks versus non XT processors. On October 8, 2020, AMD announced the highly anticipated Zen 3 architecture for their Ryzen 5000 series processors, featuring a 19% instructions per cycle (IPC) improvement over Zen 2, while being built on the same 7 nm TSMC node with out of the box operating boost frequencies exceeding 5 GHz for AMD's first time since Piledriver. With the launch of Zen 3 via the Ryzen 5000 series, AMD has taken the gaming performance crown from Intel, and is an important performance milestone in itself as gaming performance is based on single thread performance above all else.

A majority of AMD's consumer Ryzen products use the Socket AM4 platform. In August 2017, AMD launched their Ryzen Threadripper line aimed at the enthusiast workstation market. AMD Ryzen Threadripper uses the larger TR4, sTRX4, and sWRX8 sockets, which support additional memory channels and PCI Express lanes.

In December 2019, AMD started producing first generation Ryzen products built using the second generation Zen+ architecture. The most notable example is Ryzen 5 1600, with newest batches, having "AF" identifier instead of its usual "AE", being essentially a rebadged Ryzen 5 2600 with the same specifications as the original Ryzen 5 1600.