Finally an official statement by AMD and as expected, the filtering was in the right direction about what we will see this year and especially next year. And it is that those of Lisa Su have changed their roadmap by updating it and offering a clearer vision of what their next Zen 4 processors will be on PCs and laptops by 2023. Not that there are too many surprises as such, but the changes are focused on hurting Intel and positioning itself differently in the market.
Little information at first, but from which we can draw very interesting conclusions, because as often happens, it is not what is said, but what is omitted that generates the greatest expectation, if possible. The Zen 4 architecture will diversify and take over the market as Intel has done with Alder Lake, except that it will arrive almost a year late.
AMD Ryzen 7000 with Zen 4, a commitment to gaming
These new Ryzen 7000 are going to be unified in one architecture and almost once in three market segments where each one will have a different microarchitecture. Thus, we will have the already more than commented Raphael for desktop, Dragon Range for gaming laptops and Phoenix for Ultrabooks that curiously will also be called gaming.
Quickly summarizing what was officially revealed by the company, we have DDR5 and PCIe 5 for desktops with CPUs of more than 65 watts, DDR5 and PCIe 5 with processors of more than 55 watts for TOP laptops and LPDDR5 with PCIe 5.0 in ultra-thin laptops. with consumption between 35 to 45 watts.
All with an architecture focused on gaming, with more cores, more threads and more cache to boost performance and achieve greater productivity for content creators. This would be the quick summary if we consider that Raphael will open the jar of essences later this year ( September/October ) and in early 2023 Dragon Range and Phoenix will arrive to complete the combo.
What AMD does not say about its processors for 2023
We see that AMD has been very specific with the assignment of the type of DDR5 RAM, but there is an open door that has been revealed behind the scenes and that is that where it says DDR5, LPDDR5 could also be included in the support and vice versa.
This is important because the Phoenix variants could reach the desktop as low-power APUs and logically with low-end iGPUs. Here we enter the field of speculation, since it was commented on many occasions that Zen 4 would include iGPU as Intel does with all its current processors, and due to this, what we would have is a complete line of CPUs where the rumor is that AMD would integrate 12 CUs based on the RDNA 2 architecture.
Finally, it seems that we will finally see AMD laptops with 16 cores , since the Dragon Range would be processors based on chiplets and directly taken from Raphael wafers with chips that have not passed the tests for the latter, so the price should be more reduced compared to the previous strategy of AMD, since Phoenix could also enter this new game.
In any case, we are getting closer and if the leaks do their job, we will be able to reveal and clarify everything related to AMD processors for 2023 before their launch.