AMD’s new Ryzen CPUs are just a few months away from launch and the company is already teasing more and more of its product lineup. The latest piece of news to come out concerns the entry level chips, which go head to head with Intel’s Core i3 series.

Core i3s traditional come with no overclocking (except in one new exception, the i3-7350K) but they usually have Hyper-Threading enabled. This allows them to behave more like quad core CPUs even though they’ve only got 2 physical cores.

AMD is taking a different approach. Their budget CPUs will have 4 physical cores but have Simultaneous Multi-Threading (AMD’s version of Hyper-Threading) disabled. This means that AMD’s budget line will be true quad core processors.

While many argue that an i3 with Hyper-Threading enabled is as effective in gaming as a true quad core, many benchmarks show that true quad cores are LOTS faster doing things like rendering and in CPU-intensive games.

What’s even more exciting is that the other CPUs in the Ryzen product line will feature true 6- and 8-core chips, all with Simultaneous Multi-Threading enabled. That’ll effectively give you 12 and 16 threads each on relatively affordable chips! Bonkers!