Written by Metal Messiah

German hardware website Igor’s Lab has revealed the “clock speeds” of AMD’s early Zen 3 CPU samples, featuring higher base clock speeds than AMD’s existing Zen 2/Ryzen 3000 series processors.

These are Ryzen 4000 series desktop CPUs, for the mainstream, and high-end markets. Unlike the Ryzen 4000G series, which are based on “Renoir” silicon, Vermeer will not have any integrated graphics.

However,  they will use the new upcoming refined “Zen3” architecture, so we can expect them to be more powerful. The leak from “Igor” confirms that AMD is currently developing a 16-core SKU for the AMD Ryzen 4000 series. This could mean a “successor” to the current Ryzen 9 3950X.

Unlike Renoir which is based on Zen 2 and built for the mobility platform, AMD “Vermeer” is going to be a true successor to the Ryzen 3000 series , boasting new “architectural” enhancements as well.

The main major difference between Renoir and Vermeer for Desktop is that the former is an APU platform while the latter is a CPU-only platform. Vermeer will not feature an iGPU and will obviously be based on new “Zen 3” cores. Do note that Igor’s Lab findings are for very “early” Vermeer CPU engineering samples, which means that final retail products may feature even higher or different clock speeds.

Though these early samples already boast promising base/boost clock speeds. These initial samples are 8-core and 16-core models respectively.  A total of 5 OPNs have been leaked/spotted. Three of these are 8-core based parts, and two of these are 16-core based samples. These samples seem to be successors for the AMD’s Ryzen 7 3700X, Ryzen 7 3800X and Ryzen 9 3950X CPUs, offering similar core/thread counts as well.

The 8 core parts have three variants listed having clock speeds up to 4.6 GHz. The base clock on the other hand is set to 4.0 GHz, which is still pretty big, and should help with overall performance. One of the variants has a maximum turbo of 4.4 GHz and 3.8 base clock.

Coming to 16 core SKUs, both the 16 core parts can clock up to 4.6 GHz and they have a base clock of 3.7 GHz.  The OPNs mentions “A0 revision” which means that we are looking at very early engineering samples, featuring a unified L3 cache as well.

This finding can you some idea about the level of performance expected from these Vermeer Desktop CPU variants. It may also appear that these clock speed gains are a bit modest,  but Vermeer series of processors will feature a new Zen 3 CPU architecture, bringing big changes to AMD’s core designs as well.  This may definitively help with higher “single-threaded” and “multi-threaded” IPC boosts.

When combined this with higher “clock speeds” we can expect significant performance gains. The Zen 3 processors are going to feature a combined and a unified “L3 cache” for each Zen 3 chiplet.

This will make L3 cache access times more feasible across the entire Zen 3 chiplet. Larger cache sizes could mean longer “cache latencies”, and this is true for Zen 3 CPUs. The CPU cores can now share the information more easily.

Larger cache sizes could help with boosting Zen 3’s multi-threaded, as well as “Gaming” performance.  The previous gen Zen 2 CPUs already featured double the L3 cache over the Zen/Zen+ series chips, and ZEN 3 is going to take things to a whole new level.

AMD’s next-generation Zen 3 architecture aims to “alleviate” some of the shortcomings of AMD’s existing architecture designs.  When the Ryzen 3000 series were launched, AMD aggressively marketed Zen 2’s cache design changes, such as the “gamecache” feature, to highlight the performance jump in Gaming benchmarks.  With Zen 3’s new cache changes each CPU core will have even faster access to a larger pool of the “L3 cache”.

This is what  Igor’s Hardware actually uncovered regarding these early engineering samples.

Name: Vermeer (VMR)
Family: 19h
Models: 20h-2Fh
CPUID: 0xa20f00.

OPN 1: 100-000000063-07_46 / 40_N
OPN 2: 100-000000063-08_46 / 40_Y
OPN 3: 100-000000063-23_44 / 38_N
Revision: A0
Cores: 8
Threads: 16.

OPN 1: 100-000000059-14_46 / 37_Y
OPN 2: 100-000000059-15_46 / 37_N
Revision: A0
Cores: 16
Threads: 32.