AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs Not Arriving Until Second Half Of 2022

AMD announced its next gen­er­a­tion of CPUs won’t be arriv­ing to con­sumers until the sec­ond half of 2022. The com­pa­ny is plan­ning to speak more about these CPUs soon.

The Ryzen 7000 series of CPUs is going to be a major change for AMD, as it con­tains Zen4 archi­tec­ture that’s mov­ing to a new 5nm process man­u­fac­tured by TSMC. This will require a new sock­et for the CPUs, mean­ing back­wards-com­pat­i­bil­i­ty with exist­ing AM4 sock­ets is not an option. It does mean con­sumers can look for­ward to sup­port for the new DDR5 RAM and PCIe Gen5 (Intel already sup­ports this with its new Alder Lake chips).

AMD is also adjust­ing the design of its CPUs to an LGA design. So, the pins for the CPU will now be on the moth­er­board as opposed to the CPU itself. This is a design intel has used for years and it may be hard­er to break dur­ing instal­la­tion. Despite these changes, AMD says that exist­ing AM4 sock­et cool­er will still work with he new­er AM5 socket.

AMD is also releas­ing a brand-new Zen3 CPU in the future. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is what the com­pa­ny calls its best gam­ing CPU, despite hav­ing few­er cores than its flag­ship Ryzen 9. It fea­tures a base clock speed of 3.4GHz that can boost all the way up to 4.5GHz, as well as an 8‑cores and 16-threads.

The per­for­mance dif­fer­ence comes from the CPU’s new 3D stacked cache, which AMD says will grant con­sumers around 15% bet­ter per­for­mance in games. It con­tin­ues on the same 7nm process as the rest of the Ryzen 5000 series, but it’s com­pat­i­ble on cur­rent AM4 motherboards. 

A price for the Ryzen 7 5800X3D was not announced. How­ev­er, AMD also announced a new bud­get GPU at CES 2022 that will retail for $200.