We have a leak about the possible release date of Zen 4, AMD’s next-generation processor codenamed “Raphael”.
AMD Zen 4 “Raphael” would launch in Q4 2022
According to source @sepeuwmjh, the Zen 4 architecture is expected in the second half of 2022. The plan would be to announce the Raphael processors in Q3 2022 and launch them a few months later.
With this information, AMD would no longer have an answer to Intel’s Alder Lake launching later this year, unless they launch another CPU series later this year that updates the current Ryzen 5000 “Vermeer”.
It was recently reported that the Ryzen 6000 Warhol processors would be canceled. However, this source insists that Warhol is on its way and is the stepping stone before the Zen 4-based Raphael is released next year.
Raphael had already appeared on an earlier roadmap alongside other next-gen AMD CPUs, such as Warhol itself. So we know that Raphael was slated for early 2022, and Warhol was due for desktop release later this year.
At the moment, we don’t know exactly what AMD’s plans are for the successor to the Ryzen 5000 “Vermeer” processors, whether there will be a successor this year or we’ll have to wait until next year.
Zen 4 is supposed to offer a big improvement in IPC performance and make the leap to a 5nm process node according to the leaked roadmap.