Thanks to a new announcement from MSI on Weibo, September 15 is the newly confirmed release date for AMD's new Ryzen 7000 processors (codenamed Zen 4), and its associated AM5 platform. AMD itself confirmed a generic Q4 release this year, but MSI is the first to spill the actual release date, which is just a month away.
Ryzen 7000 (Raphael) is AMD's next-generation CPU lineup, intended to replace the well-received but aging Ryzen 5000 series CPUs. Ryzen 7000 will be one of AMD's most significant upgrades yet, featuring the brand new Zen 4 architecture and introducing a brand new socket codenamed AM5 -- AMD's first socket upgrade in 5 years.
Zen 4 will bring a lot of new performance enhancements to the Ryzen platform, featuring 15% better single-threaded performance than Zen 3 and 35% overall better performance, including muti-threaded workloads. Power efficiency has also gone up by 25%.
Zen 4's actual IPC gains are quite small, with 8 to 10% gains over Zen 3, but AMD makes up for this by dramatically improving Zen 4's clock speeds. Ryzen 7000 CPUs are expected to feature peak boost clocks well north of 5GHz, and peaking as high as 5.5GHz.
Zen 4 will also be the first Ryzen architecture with AVX-512 support baked in and full RDNA2 integrated graphics support by default. Previous Ryzen chips were broken down into CPUs and APUs, with the APU variants featuring Vega integrated graphics chips at the cost of L3 cache size. With Ryzen 7000, these limitations will be gone.
Ryzen 7000 also brings the first new socket we've seen from AMD in 5 years, called AM5. In addition, this new motherboard platform brings a host of new connectivity standards to Ryzen, including DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 -- bringing it up to par with Intel's 12th Gen Alder Lake and upcoming 13th Gen Raptor Lake CPUs.
As a result, Ryzen 7000 will feature more memory bandwidth and better connectivity than ever before, thanks to these new standards. Chipsets are also changing, with the baseline model being B650, the midrange transferring to X670, and the flagship variant evolving into X670E.
This will be the first major platform upgrade in years since AMD introduced the first generation Ryzen back in 2017. As a result, builders will need to buy or upgrade the CPU and motherboard to get Ryzen 7000's capabilities. Not to mention buying into the DDR5 ecosystem as well.