AMD has announced the release of two Zen 2 core architecture processors geared towards gamers and business users at budget-friendly prices.

The Ryzen 3 3300X and Ryzen 3 3100 are each 4-core/8-thread processors packed with 18MB of total cache that company officials say will allow significant reduction in memory latency. This means "smoother, faster gaming performance for high framerates in CPU-heavy games," according to a company statement posted online Tuesday.

The Ryzen 3 3300X runs at 3.8GHz and can boost up to 4.3GHz, while the Ryzen 3 3100 runs at 3.6GHz with boost up to 3.9HGHz. The 3300X will retail for $120 and the 3100 for $99.

The chips are a step up from the earlier Ryzen 3 2300X processors with 4-core/4-thread architecture and 8MB cache. Employing Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) technology on these chips, each physical core can run two instruction streams simultaneously, thus boosting performance efficiently and economically.

SMT technology is essentially the same as Intel's hyper-threading.

In addition, the new, more will carry the same thermal design power (TDP) rating of 65W, which means they are more energy-efficient than their predecessors. The TDP is the highest amount of heat generated by a CPU that must be dissipated by a cooling system. Systems with higher heat emissions may require more powerful and expensive fans or a liquid cooling system.

AMD has competed successfully against longtime rival Intel in the desktop PC market with its family of powerful 3000-series Ryzen 5, Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 CPUs. But the arrival of the newest processors marks AMD's first entries into the lower-priced market.

The new processors promise better gaming experience. AMD claims up to a 20 percent boost in gaming performance and up to 75 percent hike in creator performance. The nearest competitor, the Intel Core i3-9100, was used for comparison.

"Games and applications are becoming more and more demanding," said Saeid Moshkelani, senior vice president and general manager, client business unit. "Users are demanding more from their PCs… We've taken performance up a level, doubling the processing threads of our Ryzen 3 processors to propel gaming and multitasking experiences to new heights."

Also announced Tuesday was a new B550 chipset for socket AM4, providing support for PCIe 4.0. AMD's manufacturing partners Asus, ASRock, Booster, Gigabyte and MSI are expected to have the boards ready this June.

The AMD Ryzen 3 3100 and AMD Ryzen 3 3300X are expected to be available May 21.