AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs Not Coming Until Second Half Of 2022

AMD has announced that its next generation of desktop CPUs will only be coming in the second half of 2022, with the company planning to talk more about them soon.

The Ryzen 7000 series of CPUs is set to be a big change for AMD, with the Zen4 architecture moving to a new 5nm process manufactured by TSMC. This will require a new socket for the CPUs meaning backwards-compatibility with existing AM4 sockets is out of the question, but it does mean you can look forward to support for new DDR5 RAM and PCIe Gen5 (which Intel already supports with its new Alder Lake chips).

AMD is also changing the design of its CPUs to an LGA design, meaning that the pins for the CPU will now be on the motherboard as opposed to the CPU itself. This is a design Intel has used for years now and might make it a little harder to break during installation. Despite the changes, AMD says that existing AM4 socket coolers will still work with the newer AM5 socket.

In lieu of any Zen4 processors launching in the next few months,, AMD is releasing a brand-new Zen3 CPU in the nearer future. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is now what the company calls its best gaming CPU, despite having fewer cores than its flagship Ryzen 9 chips. This 8-core, 16-threads CPU features a base clock speed of 3.4GHz, boosting all the way up to 4.5GHz.

The performance difference comes from the CPU's new 3D stacked cache, which AMD says will net you around 15% better performance in games. It's still on the same 7nm process as the rest of the Ryzen 5000 series but is at least compatible on current AM4 motherboards. A price was, however, not announced. AMD also announced a new, budget RDNA 2 GPU at CES 2022 which will retail for $200.