AMD Readies Ryzen 5 Series and will offer six- and four-core processors starting April 11

AMD today is announcing more Ryzen processors. As you guys know AMD made a promise to release the Ryzen 5 series in Q2 this year. Well, they have been able to meet that time slot and as such we can shed some light on Ryzen 5 processors that are to be released April 11^th.

First off I wanted to write a quick apology to the AMD team, a handful of you might have noticed this news-item yesterday morning already. Ye ol' Hilbert here converted the embargo time wrong, which was initially set at March 15th 11pm CT. Once you convert CT to CET that reads 5am CET (central european standard time). However, that would be on the next day, and not the current day for Europe. So all info that you all have been able to read widely on the web yesterday is a result of a time conversion error from our side. In the minutes the news-item was only all content including full screenshots got posted and plastered onto the web everywhere. That is so how we not roll. That said, it's 4 and 6-core Ryzen time you guys. Ryzen 5 will be a handful of 6-core processors as well as 4-core processors, priced attractively I must say. Both the 6 and 4 core models all are SMT thus you may double up the cores into threads 4:8 and 6:12.

AMD will release four new models:

• Ryzen 5 1600X
  This is a six-core part with 12-threads. The base frequency will be 3.6 GHz with a nice 4.0 Ghz boost frequency. This processor will cost 249 USD.
• Ryzen 5 1600
  This is a six-core part with 12-threads. The base frequency will be 3.2 GHz with a nice 3.6 GHz boost  aka turbo frequency. This processor will cost 219 USD.
• Ryzen 5 1500X
  This is a four-core part with 8-threads. The base frequency will be 3.5 GHz with a 3.7 GHz boost  aka turbo frequency. This processor will cost 189 USD.
• Ryzen 5 1400
  The 1400 is again a four-core part with 8-threads. The base frequency will be 3.2 GHz with a 3.4 GHz boost aka turbo frequency. This processor will cost 169 USD.

As stated before these processors are priced competitive alright. The flagship units will have a 95 Watt TDP, the lower SKUs settle for 65 Watts. These value are indicative that the processors are all 8-core models with a CCX or two cores disabled, this is yet to be confirmed though.

Update: The six-core parts will configured into a strict 3+3 combination, while the four-core parts will use 2+2. This confirms that both core clusters are in use and indeed these are 8-core parts with cores disabled. That also means for the 4-core enabled parts, the CCX clusters will run into the very same CPU bound game performance challenges. Then again with less cores enabled there's also less load and thus there should be less latency in-between the two CCXes.

AMD is going to make SKUs available with a stock coolers, these will be the Wraith Stealth for the Ryzen 5 1400 and the Wraith Spire for the 1600 and 1600X. These stock coolers do not have LED lighting enabled.

Improved XFR ranges - Ryzen 5 1500X also has support for an extended XFR frequency range of up to 3.9GHz (+200MHz over the max, all-core turbo frequency), XFR details for the other processors in the line-up have not been detailed. The four Ryzen 5 processors will be available starting April 11^th. Ryzen series 3 you will see in the 2^nd Half of 2017. 

 
In the above table you can see the launch SKUs as well as an overview of what to expect in the coming months processor wise, it is going to be a busy year with AMD processor reviews alright. Have a browse below at the media deck for some more details.