An engineering sample for a 12-core, 24-thread AMD Ryzen CPU has been spotted over at userbenchmark. The core-heavy chip is running on the AM4 platform, and from that we can deduce that it’s one of the first engineering samples we’ve seen for AMD’s 3rd Gen Ryzen processors.

Running at 3.4GHz base and clocking up to 3.7GHz, this engineering sample runs a fair bit shy of the current Ryzen 7 2700X at 3.7GHz/4.3GHz. We’re not worried, however, it’s still early days for AMD’s 7nm Zen 2 chiplets, with a launch not expected until sometime late May/early June – just in time for the Taipei tech show, Computex.

AMD announced 3rd Gen Ryzen over at CES this year. During the keynote, Lisa Su held up a bare AM4 chip, offering up a glimpse of AMD’s Zen 2 chiplet design. That’s one 14nm I/O chip with a single eight-core 7nm chiplet filled to the brim with processing cores. However, there was also enough space for another chiplet to make it onto the AM4 design – likely opening the door to up to 16 cores of processing power.