During its Financial Analyst Day 2022, AMD shared updated roadmaps for its future desktop and mobile processors spanning 2024. On the desktop side, the chipmaker will unleash the Ryzen 7000 (Raphael) army this fall, but that won’t be the last we’ll hear of Zen 4.
The desktop processor roadmap shows that AMD will give Ryzen 7000 the 3D V-Cache treatment. Therefore, we can expect an heir to AMD’s existing Ryzen 7 5700X3D as a minimum. Unfortunately, the chipmaker didn’t reveal if it has more SKUs in mind this time around.
Professional and workstation users will be happy to know that AMD will port its Zen 4 cores over to the Threadripper family. It’s great news considering that HEDT processors have been fading away in the last couple of years. However, AMD’s roadmap only shows the Threadripper branding, so it’s unknown whether Zen 4 will come to the vanilla Threadripper and Pro counterparts or only the latter. With Zen 3, AMD only released the Threadripper Pro 5000 WX series. The non-Pro versions have yet to come, and they maybe never will.
Assuming no setbacks, Zen 5 won’t arrive until 2024. That means that AMD will give Zen 4 at least two years of shelf life. The codename for Zen 5 is Granite Ridge, and AMD refers to an “advanced node” for the future chips. We assume they’ll come out of the 4nm or 3nm furnace. Supposing that AMD doesn’t pull another Ryzen 7000 on us and skip a ‘1000’ entirely, the Zen 5 chips will likely debut as the Ryzen 8000 series. AMD has confirmed that AM5 will be a long-lived platform similar to what AM4 represented. Therefore, Granite Ridge will slot into the AM5 socket.
For mobile, AMD is currently on the 6nm Ryzen 6000 (Rembrandt) lineup that brought Zen 3+ cores and RDNA graphics into a single package. Phoenix Point, the successor to Rembrandt, will wield Zen 4 cores, RDNA 3 graphics, and Artificial Intelligence Engine (AIE) hailing from Xilinx. TSMC will produce Phoenix Point for AMD on the foundry’s latest 4nm process node.
Strix Point, which lands in 2024, will wield AMD’s Zen 5 cores and RDNA 3+ graphics and retains the same AIE. RDNA 3+ is likely a refresh of the RDNA 3 engine with improved performance per watt. Strix Point’s configuration suggests that AMD gives its mobile chips a slight pause between RDNA 3 and RDNA 4. AMD’s roadmap only shows Strix Point with Zen 5 cores. However, a leaked roadmap claimed Strix Point might have a hybrid design like Intel’s 12th Generation Alder Lake chips. The rumor pointed to Zen 5 and Zen 4D cores, with the latter presumably being a power-optimized variant of Zen 4.