In under a week, AMD will have launched their mainstream Ryzen 5 processors. Joining Ryzen 7 which launched last month, that will be all of the Ryzen processors we will be getting for the first half of 2017. In the second half, AMD is expected to release Ryzen 3, the budget lineup at the bottom of the stack. While official information is limited, we now have confirmation from ASRock about some of the Ryzen 3 1200 specifications.
On the support page for ASRock’s AB350M-HDV motherboard, the Ryzen 3 1200 is now listed as being compatible. Part of the Summit Ridge family, YD1200BBM4KAE has a base clock of 3.1 GHz with a low 65W TDP. The chip is expected to be 4 cores with 4 threads and without SMT. Interestingly, the available cache is listed at 2MB which is absurdly small. Past reports have suggested at least 4MB of L3 cache for Ryzen quad cores so perhaps the 2MB number is referring to the L2 cache which fits for a 4 core Zen based CPU.
There is also the remote possibility that Ryzen 3 1200 might be a simple dual core unit. However, AMD has generally addressed the dual core market with cut down APUs, with native CPUs cut down to 4 cores at most. The use of the 8 core Ryzen 2x CCX die also means a dual core chip would be throwing away 75% of its useful space. The other option would be a single CCX but no reports have come out suggesting that. Hopefully, Ryzen 3 will launch sooner rather than later in 2H 2017 and finish off the Ryzen launch.
