Update: Due to a lack of corroborating evidence, consider this rumor false until proven otherwise.
AMD’s Ryzen processors marked the successful rebirth of the company’s CPU line up when the top end Ryzen 7 1800X, 1700X, and 1700 hit the market in March 2017. Motherboard manufacturers had stated earlier that a 12 nm Zen refresh would arrive in February 2018, and some newly leaked presentation slides claim a 1st of February release for the new Ryzen 7 2800X, 2800, and 2700 CPUs.
These 2nd generation Ryzen chips fall into the ‘Pinnacle Ridge’ family and continue to use the same AM4 socket, maintaining backward compatibility. The slides also show that the Zen-2-based ‘Matisse’ family will use the AM4 socket.
AMD claims that the 2800X performs 82% higher than the 1800X, and we would assume this is in multi-threaded performance since the most significant difference between the two chips is a 50% increase in core/thread count at 12 cores and 24 threads (vs. 8 cores and 16 threads). The other important change is a higher clock speed across the board with a multi-core frequency of 4.6 GHz and single-core frequency of 5.1 GHz against the 1800X’s 3.6 GHz and 4.1 GHz.
The Ryzen 7 2700 has 12 cores / 24 threads at 4.0 / 4.5 GHz, and the Ryzen 7 2800 is also 12 cores / 24 threads but at a faster 4.4 / 4.9 GHz.
Shipping begins the 1st of February 2018, and MSRP starts at US$329 for the 2700, US$399 for the 2800, and finishes at US$449 for the 2800X.