As we edge closer to the launch of AMD's Ryzen 3000 series we are learning more details about some of the new features it will offer. The latest of which is that the Zen 2 architecture will be able to overclock its memory controller much higher than previous Zen implementations (and thus previous-gen Ryzen CPUs), as high as DDR4 5000 MHz according to the most recent wave of leaks. If this turns out to be the case it will mean that AMD's memory controller has now reached parity with Intel in terms of overclocking capability.
With Zen 2 AMD has moved the memory controller and PCI Express logic to a separate chip called the "IO die" which will still be manufactured using the existing 12nm process node while the CPU cores and CPU cache will be manufactured with the new 7nm node. The "IO die" will communicate with the "CPU die" via AMD's Infinity Fabric similar to other Zen designs. This separation will also allow AMD to quickly manufacturer new chips and possibly scale CPU core count higher than current generations.
It remains to be confirmed if these new Ryzen 3000 series CPU's will be able to scale their memory controllers as high on older motherboard platforms such as the X470 and B450 or if this will be a new feature that will help entice users to upgrade to the upcoming X570 platform.
It will also be interesting to see how much of a performance uplift this will give the Ryzen 3000 series overall, because as we have seen before in testing the Zen architecture is much more memory sensitive then Intel's Core designs and increasing the memory speed has yielded sizable performance increases. One thing is certain, we wont have to wait much longer to see what AMD's latest offering can do.