The tentative release date of the Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 series Raphael processors has been widely circulated. Following a Computex announcement, some speculated that they would hit shelves as early as July 2022. Despite the fact that the information came from a highly credible source, none of the subsequent leaks corroborated it. According to a new DigiTimes report, the CPUs will be unveiled in September 2022. To put things in perspective, the Ryzen 5000 series was announced on November 5, 2020.
The news isn’t surprising given that Raphael went into mass production in late March 2022. It will be the first AMD CPU to use TSMC’s 5 nm manufacturing node, putting it on par with Intel’s Meteor Lake processors, which will reportedly forego Intel’s in-house foundry in favor of TSMC’s N5 and N4 nodes. Zen 4 is expected to support blazing-fast DDR5 RAM and PCIe 5.0, putting Team Red on par with Alder Lake. The top-of-the-line Ryzen 9 7950X will stick to AMD’s tried-and-true 16-core design, so core counts are unlikely to increase.
According to Digitimes, AMD’s new Ryzen 7000 Raphael CPU series will be available in September 2022. So that timeline seems plausible. AMD may clarify it at Computex 2022.
According to the DigiTimes report, some Zen 4-based EPYC parts are in the works for a 2023 release. A previous leak mentioned Threadripper SKUs based on the same architecture, but the 96-core part will only be available to OEMs. Overall, H2 2022 will be jam-packed with high-profile launches, including Intel’s Meteor Lake processors, AMD’s Radeon RX 7000 graphics cards, and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4000 series.
