AMD Ryzen 7000 ‘Zen 4’ Desktop CPUs Detailed: Here’s What We Know (So Far)
At a press and analyst event in Austin, Texas, AMD unsealed its plans for its much-anticipated Ryzen 7000 desktop CPU line, code-named “Raphael.” First tipped at CES 2022, the Ryzen 7000 will be the first set of consumer chips to employ the new “Zen 4” microarchitecture with leading-edge process technology. The first chips in the new line will target power users and gamers.
The Zen 4 essentials were shared by AMD's Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su, and CTO Mark Papermaster. Built on 5-nanometer process technology from TSMC for its CCDs (the I/O portion, home to the PCIe 5.0 and memory controllers, is on 6nm), the Ryzen 7000 is the first large-scale architectural advance from AMD on its desktop processors since 2020. November of that year saw the launch of “Zen 3” to consumers, in Ryzen 5000 desktop (“Vermeer”) chips like the Ryzen 9 5900X, and Zen 3 was expanded to the company’s workstation-grade Threadripper Pro chips in 2022. Zen 3 came to laptops after the initial Zen 3 launch, in the 5000-series-mobile “Cezanne” line (the first of which debuted in January 2021) and a later refresh in the form of Ryzen 6000 H- and U-series mobile CPUs (“Rembrandt”) in early 2022. (See our initial tests of laptop samples bearing Cezanne and Rembrandt mobile chips.)
Now at the end of 2022 we will get our first taste of something new from AMD after two long years of waiting. A Ryzen 6000 desktop-CPU family never materialized, though some integrated-graphics-equipped (IGP) Ryzen 5000 CPUs and enhanced Ryzen 4000 chips (formerly OEM-only) fleshed out the desktop line between 2020 and present. Thus the pent-up demand for more detail on AMD's latest big chip update, coming on the heels of Intel's own largely successful 12th Generation "Alder Lake"
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