AMD’s next-generation Zen 4 Ryzen desktop CPUs might not launch until late 2022, almost a year after the debut of Intel’s 12th-generation Alder Lake lineup.
That’s according to Twitter tipster Sepeuwmjh, who suggests AMD’s Zen 4 processors, codenamed ‘Raphael’, will be announced in September or October of 2022, with a release scheduled a month or two later.
That means AMD Zen 4 could arrive two full years after the launch of the Zen 3-based Ryzen 5000 desktop CPUs, and almost a year after Intel debuts its much-hyped Alder Lake desktop processor lineup.
If this latest rumor is to be believed, this also means AMD will be turning up late to the DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 party, as Intel’s Alder Lake CPUs are expected to support both standards when they launch later this year.
That is unless AMD releases an upgrade to its Zen 3 architecture later this year – but that looks unlikely. AMD Ryzen 6000 CPUs, codenamed ‘Warhol’ and based on Zen 3+, are said to have disappeared off AMD’s recent roadmap for 2021. Instead, speculation suggests AMD may skip over releasing these new CPUs in Q4 of 2021 as previously planned and go straight to Zen 4 instead.
While these rumors suggest Zen 4 remains some way off, it sounds like it will be worth waiting for. Raphael CPUs will be based on a 5nm architecture & will feature 6nm I/O dies in a chiplet design. AMD has hinted at that it will be increasing the core counts of its next-gen desktop CPUs, so we can expect a slight bump from the current max of 16 cores and 32 threads.
In terms of performance, the incoming Zen 4 architecture is rumored to deliver up to 25% IPC gain over Zen 3 and hit clock speeds of around 5 GHz.
The processors could feature built-in RDNA 2 graphics too, as a recent rumor suggested that AMD is planning to equip all of its processors with Navi-based graphics when it shifts away from the AM4 socket.
Via: PCGamesN
