
It’s astonishing how far CPUs have come in just the last few years. After stagnating at 4 cores while slowly growing single-threaded performance for nearly a decade, mainstream desktop CPUs have seen explosive growth in both single- and multi-core performance recently thanks to renewed competition between Intel and AMD.

AMD Next-Gen In 3 Months?
As you can see in the slide above, the desktop processors based on Zen 4 will be known as the Ryzen 7000 series. AMD hasn’t announced any model numbers or specifications for the chips just yet, but if Greymon55’s latest information is accurate, they’ll probably follow existing naming conventions for Ryzen CPUs.
In the tweet pictured above, Greymon55 lists the Zen 4 processors that are likely to hit on launch. He doesn’t define any specifications, but we know that the Ryzen 7000 series tops out at 16 cores, just like Ryzen 5000 and 3000. If we go by the extant naming convention, that makes the 7950X the top-end 16-core SKU, the 7900X a twelve-core processors, the 7800X an eight-core processor, and the 7600X a six-core processor.
This is notably the exact same line-up that AMD had for the launch of its Ryzen 5000 series processors back in late 2020. So saying, none of this is particularly surprising, but what is surprising is the further rumor that AMD plans to have Socket AM4-compatible products based on Zen 4 cores.
That notion comes from a reseller and Greymon55 himself notes that it’s a rumor of dubious quality, but it’s not impossible that AMD could wire up some kind of hybrid design with Zen 4 CPU cores and a Zen 3 I/O die. Doing so would lock you out of many of the benefits of the AM5 platform, including PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 memory, but it might make a tantalizing upgrade option for those with AM4 systems.
AMD hasn’t given any solid dates on the Ryzen 7000 series yet, but the “Raphael” processors are expected to have gone into production as early as April this year. A leaked photo from what is purported to be an AMD China “dealer promotion meeting” yesterday seems to indicate that Socket AM5 CPUs will go on sale on September 15th, but there’s little context to go with the picture. If that date is accurate, we’re less than three months away.