AMD might be riding high on the release of its 5800X3D, a swangsong to the AM4 platform if ever there was one, but it's set to debut its new line of Zen 4 AM5 CPUs in the coming months, and the latest rumors suggest they could be something monumentally more impressive.
AMD's upcoming Zen 4 will mark a huge shift in its product lineup. After five years, it's finally moving on from the AM4 socket, and introduces DDR5 memory too. That shift will also bring with it some big changes on the chip, too. While it won't have 3D VCache, the Zen 4 dies will be built on a new 5nm process, will have IPC increases of between 15 and 24 percent, and a 10% or more boost to clock speeds. We're already seeing some leaked samples running at 5.2GHz.
This will reportedly give single threaded performance boosts of as much as 37% in some cases, with multi-threaded performance at least matching that, or perhaps even eclipsing it.
That should be more than enough for Zen 4 to blow past Intel's existing Alder Lake processors, and likely at much greater efficiency, too. The question is, can it stand up to Raptor Lake? Intel's next generation CPUs are rumored to have a lot more efficiency cores than their predecessors, which could raise multi-threaded performance significantly.
The launch schedule for AMD's new chips pegs the consumer Ryzen processors in the second half of the year, probably Q3, with APUs, and mobile chips showing up in early 2023.