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AMD's XT chips are faster versions of its Ryzen 3000 CPUs

The 4000 series is likely months away.

AMD

AMD’s Ryzen 3000 series of CPUs have been available in various forms for about a year now. Power users and PC gamers will have to wait a bit longer before upgrading to the forthcoming 4000 desktop series, though. As a stopgap, the chip maker is releasing the Ryzen 3000XT series, which uses a 7nm manufacturing process. AMD says that these chips will have a four percent performance boost over those from the 3000 series.

The Ryzen 9 3900XT, 7 3800XT and 5 3600XT processors have 12, eight and six cores, respectively. The 3900XT will cost $499, the 3800XT will be $399 and the 3600XT will cost $249. The new chips top off at 4.7GHz, which should be powerful enough to run the latest games, edit 4K footage or run 3D rendering applications. All three will be out on July 7th.

In addition to the new CPU announcements, AMD also released its B550 chipset, which is the company's first mainstream chipset with support for PCIe 4.0, following last year's "enthusiast" X570 chipset. Motherboards incorporating the new B550 chipset are available from today. These will provide more bandwidth for graphics cards and SSDs than the B450 motherboards they replace.

Hopefully motherboards will incorporate the PCIe 4.0 chipset soon. Meanwhile, if gamers and media producers are looking to update their CPUs, it might be a good idea to wait for the Ryzen 4000 series for desktops. But if they need a new setup imminently, the 3000XT series could be a better choice than the standard 3000 CPUs.