Thursday, May 20th 2021
AMD Confirms B2 Ryzen 5000 Stepping Brings No Performance Improvements
AMD has recently confirmed that the upcoming B2 stepping for Ryzen 5000 processors will only improve production and availability with no impact on performance. The new stepping will be deployed within the next 6 months and will be fully compatible with existing motherboards without the need for a BIOS update. We initially believed that the new revisions may bring small performance improvements similar to existing Ryzen XT products however with this recent confirmation from AMD we now know that this is not the case. AMD has not confirmed if they are preparing a potential Ryzen 5000XT series which would likely be the final release on the AM4 platform.
Sources:
Benchmark, @patrickschur_
AMDAs part of our continued effort to expand our manufacturing and logistics capabilities, AMD will gradually move AMD Ryzen 5000 Series Desktop Processors to B2 Revision over the next 6 months. The revision does not bring improvements in terms of functionality or performance, furthermore, no BIOS update will be required.
31 Comments on AMD Confirms B2 Ryzen 5000 Stepping Brings No Performance Improvements
Since there is no new improvement only production ramp up, I guess, there's no point for waiting and getting a 5000 series now is a good idea.
BTW. Have you noticed that 5000 series are available? They are where I live and the prices dropped. Especially for the 5800X
amd is cool quite and fast now............. perfect cpu
www.anandtech.com/show/16535/intel-core-i7-11700k-review-blasting-off-with-rocket-lake/2
And well, there's 5800X but that's easily fixable with PPT alone.
Still, curious about this B2 stepping over previous B0. Didn't 3000XT still show up as Matisse-B0? Makes me wonder what exactly is the reason for the update. Maybe downgrading the binning of CCD2 on 5900X/5950X to improve yields, but stock is already much better so idk. Or maybe reducing CCD1 minimum binning seeing as a lot of Vermeer chips comfortably boost past their rated speeds. Then there was also the dual CCD 5600X, not sure what came of that.
What's hurting Intel right now isn't bigLITTLE or it's concept it's Intel's manufacturing node needs a shrink desperately that will change things a lot for core count and clock speeds for both big and LITTLE cores within the design. Intel waited to damn long to react on contracting other manufactures to produce it's chips. It's not like Intel didn't know 10nm wasn't a complete mess even now it's not at all what it should be for the node on the other hand 14nm has exceeded expectations for the node itself so 10nm has room to ferment. Let's hope Intel doesn't botch it's next node shrink.
They could at any point make changes to the binning of processors you write of, even without a new die stepping.
maybe security vulnerabilities fixes which slightly degrade performance on specific worklods?
They interact much, much better with the scheduler than Matisse did, that much is for sure. Oh, I don't doubt that AMD makes behind the scene changes. The previous gens didn't outwardly advertise multiple steppings, and Matisse went from 3.9@1.3V to 4.5@1.25V on the original stepping. Just curious that AMD's choosing to do this now on Vermeer, had to be something at least somewhat worth noting.
Amd is choosing to do this now because the initial stepping had some yield related problem/bug in it. Otherwise the change would affect performance or feature set, which does not appear to be the case based on the press release. A new stepping just means that they did slight revisions to the development masks, likely just widening some features or increasing keep out areas, nothing more and nothing less.
But oh boy they overclocked so much better than C2.
It's been a new process node for AMD (and TSMC for that matter) and a new core, so process improvements to reduce defects and increase yield, along with some bugfixing are all expected.
Maybe lack of competition from Alder Late did not force their hand to eek out minor performance increases (at the expense of power/temps) or maybe the manufacturing process just didn't have it in it. In any case, it's a win for the consumer if thanks to this stepping availability will increase at/below MSRP and system stability will improve.
by how much?