A metaphorical treasure trove of information just appeared on Bluechip’s (a German PC OEM) website. German speakers might get more out of the video presentation there, but a document shows us what we need to know. Pictured above are timelines for AMD’s and Intel’s 2018 product releases.
Jumping into them, we see that AMD apparently has a new flagship chipset for the AM4 socket called Z490. The timeline pegs its reveal for June, at Computex 2018. The apparent successor of the current B350 mid-range chipset, the B450, is set for release later in July. Finally, a refresh for Threadripper simply labeled as "Threadripper Gen 2" and the X399 chipset is set for August.
On the Intel side, we see that the much-leaked Z390 chipset won’t be debuting until Q3 2018. The slide seemingly confirms earlier leaks that the chipset will support future 10nm Cannon Lake (CNL) and current Coffee Lake (CFL) processors. As for the latter, the slides reveal that the previously leaked eight-core parts will be sampled to OEMs in June and won’t hit retail until Q4 2018. Entirely absent from the slides are any mention of Intel’s X399 chipset, which is the apparent successor to the current X299 chipset.
The biggest reveal here is probably AMD’s Z490 chipset. We’ve so far had no indication that the company was prepping a new flagship chipset for Ryzen. The documents give no indication of what differences it has compared to X470, which is already billed as having most of what a mainstream desktop needs. We surmise that the Z490 could feature more PCIe 3.0 lanes for SSDs, but we don’t see it integrating Thunderbolt.
At least we won’t be waiting long to find out.
