Our latest review article does cover the third member of the AMD Ryzen™ 7 family, which is the 1700X. As its bigger brother, the 1800X, it comes with no less than eight physical cores, sixteen threads and a TDP of 95W. This Ryzen SKU was built to go against the Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E six-core Intel model and carries a MSRP of $399.

Again, we will like to remind you guys some small details regarding the product naming scheme but also on the Zen architecture the Ryzen 7 1700X is built on.

The product naming of the new Ryzen processors from AMD has been carefully thought out and is applicable for all current and future segments: Ryzen 7, Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3:

This Ryzen 7 1700X SKU is integrating the Zen architecture, which focuses on four different key areas: performance, throughput, efficiency but also scalability.

Regarding performance, the new Zen microarchitecture represents a very big leap in core execution capability versus the previous designs from the same company: Zen come with a 1.75X larger instruction scheduler window and 1.5X greater issue width and resources. This practically allows Zen to schedule and send more work into the EUs. Thanks to a new micro-op cache, Zen is allowed to bypass L2 and L3 caches when using frequently accessed micro-operations. The neural network-based branch prediction unit from the Zen microarchitecture does allow for more intelligent preparation of optimal instructions and pathways for future work.

Changes have been also made regarding the cache hierarchy with dedicated 64KB L1 instruction and data caches, we do have 512KB dedicated L2 cache per core and 8MB of L3 cache shared across four cores. The cache is enhanced with a learning prefetcher that speculatively harvests application data into the caches so they are practically available for immediate execution. These changes are assuring up to 5X greater cache bandwidth into a core. This type of design enhances the Zen architecture's throughput.

When talking about efficiency, the new Ryzen processors are built on the more power-efficient 14nm FinFET process; in more detail, the Zen architecture is using the density-optimized version of the Global Foundries 14nm FinFET process and this fact permits for smaller die sizes and lower operating voltages. The new Zen microarchitecture does incorporate some of the latest low-power design technologies:

-micro-op cache for reducing power-intensive faraway fetches

-aggressive clock gating to zero out dynamic power consumption in minimally utilized regions of the core

-a stack engine for low-power address generation into the dispatcher.

Moving on to the scalability aspect, Zen architecture does start with the CCX (CPU Complex) which is a native 4C8T module; each CCX does come with 64K L1 I-cache, 64K L1 D-cache, 512KB of dedicated L2 cache per core and 8MB of L3 cache shared across all cores. Each core that is contained in the CCX may optionally come with SMD for additional threads.