With all the talk in the processor world very much being of Intel’s next-gen Comet Lake CPUs of late, AMD could throw a spanner in the works of its rival’s PR machine by unveiling Ryzen 4000 chips at CES 2020 (where Intel is also expected to be hyping up Comet Lake).
Although we should be clear from the outset that this is one of the sketchier rumors to be aired about AMD’s next-gen processors, but it’s obviously a very interesting one which comes from a Taiwanese newspaper as highlighted on Twitter (spotted by Wccftech).
Taiwan newspaper:"AMD CEO Lisa Su may disclose more details about Zen 3 architecture at a press conference during CES...." pic.twitter.com/1g9ypTtr2aJanuary 1, 2020
As you can see, going by the translation, AMD’s CEO may reveal further details about Zen 3 at a CES press event – Zen 3 being the architecture employed in the next-gen Ryzen 4000 processors. We will also apparently hear more about Ryzen Threadripper 4000, and next-gen Epyc server chips to boot.
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If this is true, the other question is exactly what could be revealed by Lisa Su, with the likelihood at this early stage being that it might just be very basic teaser material – and perhaps some indication of the launch timeframe for Ryzen 4000.
The report further notes that Zen 3 processors are expected to land in the second half of 2020, which tallies with what we’ve heard previously.
Big boost
As you may be aware, Zen 3 is built on a refined 7nm+ process, and it promises a big performance boost over existing Ryzen 3000 CPUs, with a new chip architecture. So maybe – just maybe – we might get some indication of the performance uplift we can expect at CES.
Ryzen 4th-gen, then, certainly seems something to be excited about, and with AMD’s CTO Mark Papermaster making it clear that the chip maker isn’t about to stop loading up its processors with even more cores, we’ve even previously wondered about whether we might see a 32-core CPU with Ryzen 4000.
That’s getting into the territory of wild speculation, of course, and according to this latest report, it won’t happen anyway. Apparently Zen 3 isn’t looking to ramp up core counts, but rather clock speeds, at least going by this fresh rumor.
At any rate, whatever AMD is planning for its next-gen chips, with any luck we’ll learn a bit more about them at CES 2020. An initial reveal, or at least a teaser, certainly makes sense for AMD when it comes to attempting to take some of the wind out of Comet Lake’s sails.
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