AMD: Ryzen 5000 Refresh Incoming, Zen 4 and RDNA 3 in 2022

Following the announcement of AMD's record financial results for Q2 2021, the company's chief executive officer Lisa Su gave a brief glimpse of the company's short-term roadmap. AMD intends to introduce products based on its next-generation Zen 4 and RDNA 3 architectures in 2022. For 2021, the company seems to be planning a refresh of the Ryzen 5000 processor family. 

"We remain on track to launch next generation products in 2022, including our Zen 4 processors built with industry leading 5 nm process technology and our RDNA 3 GPUs," said Lisa Su during the earnings call with analysts and investors (via SeekingAlpha). "Our engineering teams are aggressively driving our product and technology roadmaps to continue setting the pace of innovation for high performance computing." 

Since AMD introduced its latest Zen 3-based Ryzen 5000-series CPUs for desktops and notebooks very late last year and followed up with Epyc 'Milan' processors for servers in March, it was not really likely that the company will rush any products based on its Zen 4 microarchitecture to the market late in 2021 (and even in early 2022). In fact, server-oriented Epyc 'Genoa' will be launched when AMD's partners are ready with their platforms for the new processor that uses an all-new platform architecture with DDR5 memory. 

The same applies to AMD's RDNA 2-based Radeon RX 6000-series graphics processors. In fact, since the company cannot really meet demand for its Radeon RX 6800/6900 GPUs and has not even formally launched its midrange and entry-level products powered by the same technology, it would barely make sense to introduce any new high-end offerings. Furthermore, just like its rival on the graphics front, AMD does not strive to introduce an all-new GPU architecture on a yearly cadence.  

But while Zen 4-based processors will be launched sometimes in 2022, AMD's executive implied that it has some new Ryzen 5000 offerings in the pipeline that will address market segments that AMD has not properly addressed yet, such as premium and commercial notebooks. 

"We have more platforms coming with our Ryzen 5000 in our next generation," said Su when asked about AMD's performance in the PC space should demand for computers slow down. "We are still underrepresented across the board in the markets that we play in, whether you are talking about datacenter or PCs, or gaming. On the PC side […] we are making very good progress in commercial, premium gaming notebooks, premium consumer [laptops]." 

AMD's CEO did not elaborate on how the company plans to improve its next-generation Ryzen 5000-series APUs and CPUs. A frequency hike is one of the options for mainstream processors. For the high-end market segment AMD plans to introduce CPUs with 3D V-cache it showcased earlier this year.