AMD reportedly working on Zen 2-based Ryzen 3 CPUs to rival Intel’s Core i3 Comet Lake

In brief: AMD is said to be working on Zen 2-based quad-core CPUs to compete with Intel’s upcoming 10th generation Comet Lake-S Core i3 processors in the entry-level segment. Both chips will reportedly feature four cores / eight threads, a single CCX with 16MB of L3 cache, 2MB of L2 cache and clocks of 3.9GHz and 4.3GHz, respectively, although these are likely boost clocks, not base clocks.

The scrappy chipmaker, if you recall, launched its Ryzen 3000-series of Zen 2-based CPUs last summer. The lineup currently includes Ryzen 5, Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 entries – absent is any entry in the budget Ryzen 3 category but that could be changing.

Tom’s Hardware points to a recent Twitter post from hardware leaker @momomo_us who suggests AMD Ryzen 3 3100 (100-000000284) and Ryzen 3 3300X (100-000000159) hardware is on the way.

Both chips are listed with a 65W TDP which seems a bit high given the Zen 2 optimizations and die shrink to 7nm.

Tom’s Hardware said there are two ways AMD could go about making a quad-core Ryzen 3 chip. The first would be to repurpose defective Ryzen 5 3600 CPUs by disabling a bad CCX. Optionally, AMD could craft a new design in which there is only a single CCX inside the CCD (client compute die).