AMD’s Ryzen 7000 processors are due to arrive on September 15th, and that’s a tough sell-out date – meaning the CPUs will be on shelves and in abundant quantities, if the vine’s recent whispers prove correct.
This comes from YouTuber Moore’s law is dead (opens in new tab) (MLID), which claims that AMD will indeed have next-gen Zen 4 CPUs ready to ship to reviewers on August 10th. out for people to start playing and testing next week.
So get ready for a lot more information and leaks about how Ryzen 7000 chips are shaping up in the very near future. But more to the point, this suggests that AMD could actually release the Zen 4 silicon this month if the company really wanted to, at least in a more limited way.
But the plan, MLID claims, is to keep production going for a while and have a “very large high-volume launch” of the entire starting lineup in September. (These first CPUs released are rumored to be the Ryzen 7950X, 7900X, 7700X, and 7600X.)
This is doubly important because MLID reckons Intel is struggling to get Raptor Lake out in time for its theoretically intended debut in October. In fact, the leaker suggests this could be yet another paper roll for Intel’s 13th-gen processors, so these chips may not arrive in larger quantities until later in the year.
What this could mean is that AMD has shelves full of Ryzen 7000 processors and all the major high-end to mid-range chips by mid-September, and these products will be up against current-gen Intel Alder Lake CPUs. As Raptor Lake may not increase in quantity until several months later, even if Intel launches in October, this won’t be a case of plentiful 13th Gen stock coming out of the gate.
In short, the rumor is that Team Red will have a big advantage over Team Blue; bigger than we thought because for a while now, it’s been common speculation that AMD is going to beat Intel for release deadlines in the next-gen CPU wars.
If the MLID is correct, of course, which is a considerable value What if – but the leaker seems pretty confident that AMD is in a good place to prepare for a big launch. So much so that the company could even bring forward the launch of the Ryzen 7000 in early September rather than the middle of the month. (Although we suspect that even if that were possible, Team Red might still want to leave a little more time to sell more Ryzen 5000 stock anyway, before Zen 4 comes along.)
When Raptor Lake arrives in force, the battle of high-end processors is likely to be hotly contested, at least in terms of raw performance. AMD can, however, score wins on other metrics such as power efficiency and platform novelty – Zen 4 is on AM5, a new socket and motherboard, which will be good for future updates. Considering that Raptor Lake will be the last generation to use the current (Alder Lake) socket for Intel, this means that there is no possibility of further upgrading to a newer generation Intel CPU on these PCs without changing the motherboard as well.
Price will, of course, be a key factor, and we still have no idea how that will play out. Is there a prospect that with Raptor Lake theoretically arriving a little later than the Ryzen 7000, Intel will have to be competitively priced to get back in the game, so to speak? This is pure speculation and given past history it seems unlikely either way, but we’ll see.
One thing is for sure, namely, that this will be a fascinating battle of new generations, with AMD currently looking to be in a good position to regain some serious ground in terms of the desktop CPU realm, after Intel had considerable success with Alder Lake this year.
Don’t forget that AMD also has 3D V-cache versions of the Ryzen 7000 to come, and MLID also reckons they may arrive sooner than you might think – likely in the first half of 2023. If it’s early next year , this could be another major factor for Intel to worry about, as the 3D V cache rotations on Zen 4 CPUs will be quite the thing for gamers.