Advanced Micro Devices Inc. today unveiled a new generation of desktop chips that up the ante against market leader Intel Corp. not only in performance but also in design.

The four central processing units that AMD is introducing belong to the Ryzen series it launched last year, which has helped the company gain a considerable amount of market share in a relatively short time. The biggest improvement over the original models is that the CPUs are based on a new 12-nanometer transistor architecture.

For reference, the first chips in the Ryzen series were manufactured at the 14-nanometer scale, as are Intel’s latest-generation Coffee Lake chips. Intel has been slow to execute its plans to adopt a 10-nanometer architecture thanks to the difficulty of shrinking today’s already tiny chip circuits.

Smaller transistors means that data has to travel shorter distances inside a CPU and less power is consumed in the process, which increases performance while reducing electricity requirements. Another benefit is that more transistors can often fit on a processor, which further speeds program execution.

The number of circuits on the new Ryzen chips hasn’t increased significantly thanks to certain nuances of AMD’s design approach. Instead of boosting density, the company made improvements to the transistors and data pathways that it said allow the new CPUs to provide up to 16 percent more computing power than their predecessors. AMD also claimed the chips can beat compatible CPUs from Intel when running certain software.

One internal test conducted by the company assessed how the Ryzen 7 2700X, the most expensive of the four new chips, handled 12 applications commonly used by creative professionals. AMD said the processor was found to be 21 percent faster than a similarly priced CPU from Intel. AMD’s top-end Ryzen model lags behind on gaming, with the company’s benchmark results giving a modest 1 percent edge to its rival, but that still represents a major improvement over the first-generation chips in the series.

The $330 Ryzen 7 2700X packs eight processing cores and has a maximum clock speed of 4.3 gigahertz. The other eight-core chip introduced as part of the new lineup, the Ryzen 7 2700, comes in at $300 with a 4.1GHz ceiling. Rounding out the family is a pair of six-core CPUs available starting at $199.

Image: AMD