Rumor mill: Motherboard manufacturers and OEMs are known to have Ryzen 3000 testing units on hand, and some of them have allegedly been a little loose-lipped. As we say at least once a day: treat all leaks with suspicion, but don't let that stop you getting excited - this leak has just the right balance of logic and hype.

Bilibili user "Ito Technology" claims that motherboard manufacturers have engineering samples of mainstream Ryzen 3000 processors in the four to eight core territory, but they're expecting (and preparing for) twelve and sixteen core parts too. While final clock speeds haven't been established, the CPUs reliably run at 4.5 GHz and outperform previous parts by 15%, while having impressively low thermal output and power requirements.

The architectural shift has seen a vastly improved execution pipeline, double the core density, improvements to floating point bandwidth, better branch prediction, improvements to instruction pre-fetching... the list goes on. All in all, there's a sizeable boost in IPC (instruction per clock). The memory controller has also been upgraded, though it's not a groundbreaking improvement.

AMD X570 motherboards are believed to arrive in July with up to 40 PCIe 4.0 lanes, powering eight USB 3.1 Gen2 ports in addition to the regular expansion slots, SATA, and USB 2.0. Unfortunately manufacturers are struggling with B550 which will arrive in September. New methods are still being devised, but not all B550 boards may arrive with proper PCIe 4.0 support. As a side note, though most previous motherboards will support the new processors A320 models most likely won't.

This leak's greatest claim to reliability is also its greatest downfall: for the most part it makes way too much sense. We know that Ryzen 3000 will have 12-core parts, making it very likely there'll be 16-core parts, too. AMD's CES Cinebench run using Ryzen 3000 performed 15% better than an average 2700X (16.1% better compared to TechSpot's review sample). Doing some math, it's easy enough to calculate that AMD's CES benchmark sample was running at 4.54 GHz (though that doesn't account for IPC improvements).

A July release date is exactly mid-year: what AMD already promised to us at CES. It's already confirmed that X570 boards would have PCIe 4.0. The only surprise is the number, 40, which is double what X470 boards currently offer. Is that too high? Perhaps. But all in all, the leak is the logician's dream - is that too great a coincidence?