AMD teased its next-generation desktop chips at CES 2022, with CEO Lisa Su announcing that its Ryzen 7000 chips, using the company’s upcoming Zen 4 architecture and built on a new 5nm process, will be arriving in the second half of 2022.
The Ryzen 5000 series — led by the flagship Ryzen 5950X — was released in October 2020, when it managed to beat out Intel’s then-top-of-the-line Core i9-10900K. Intel has since reclaimed the gaming crown in most cases with its 12th Gen Core i9-12900K, which were the first desktop chips to be built on Intel’s 10nm process (which the company has since rebranded to “Intel 7”) after years of using its increasingly outdated 14nm tech.
AMD is looking to make another technical jump forward and reclaim its lead with the upcoming Zen 4 chips, which are set to be built on TSMC’s 5nm process and in turn should offer another big advance in processing power by letting AMD cram more transistors into its CPUs.
The next-gen chips will also feature a new AM5 socket, with AMD switching to an LGA design (where the pins for connecting a chip to the motherboard are located on the motherboard, instead of the current PGA design that AMD has used in the past where pins are locked on the chips). Additionally, the new chips will support PCIe Gen 5 and DDR5, bringing AMD’s upcoming hardware in line with Intel’s recently released 12th Gen Alder Lake chips for desktop. And despite the change in socket technology, AMD promises that existing AM4 coolers will still work with the new AM5 sockets.
The company isn’t giving too many details for now, though, so we’ll have to wait until AMD is ready to more formally reveal the new chips later this year.
In the meantime, AMD is showcasing an upgraded version of its Ryzen 5000 desktop chip design that’ll utilize its 3D V-Cache technology: the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which the company says is the “world’s fastest gaming processor,” outclassing both AMD’s own Ryzen 9 5900X and Intel’s Core i9-12900K. AMD says that the new chips are the first gaming chips to use its 3D stacking tech, which allows for a roughly 15 percent boost in gaming performance compared to the Ryzen 5900X.
The Ryzen 7 5800X3D has eight cores, 16 threads, a 3.4 GHz base speed with up to 4.5GHz boosted speeds, a 105W TDP, and is compatible with both AMD’s 400 series and 500 series motherboards with AM4 sockets. Unlike the upcoming Ryzen 7000 chips, it’s still on the 7nm node, however, and uses the existing Zen 3 architecture. It’ll ship later this spring, although AMD has yet to announce a price.