Most rumors had pegged the launch of AMD’s Ryzen 4000-series processors for later this year, but impatient enthusiasts who are itching to make the jump to Zen 3 may, unfortunately, be in for a longer wait. According to DigiTimes’s Taiwan branch (via Wccftech), red team has decided to push back the release of its fourth-generation Ryzen chips to 2021.
Production issues, right? Nope. This appears to be a business decision that stems from the ongoing sales success of the Ryzen 3000 “Matisse” family, as well as Intel’s inability to compete with its recently launched Comet Lake-S processors, which offer “mediocre” performance.
Translation: pic.twitter.com/VfNeQZuv4Q
— RetiredEngineer® (@chiakokhua) June 15, 2020
“According to motherboard manufacturers, sales for Ryzen 3000 series are hot,” wrote DigiTimes, as translated by @chiakokhua. “Accordingly, AMD is extending its life cycle, and definitely will not be launching the next-gen Ryzen 4000 series, based on Zen3 architecture and using TSMC’s 7nm EUV process, in Sep. The earliest Ryzen 4000 series will enter mass production is end of 2020, and launch in Jan 2021 at CES. Whether it will be changed to 5nm EUV process is unclear at the moment.”
That last point about a potential transition to 5 nm (which had already been suggested by recent rumors) is particularly interesting. How would Intel react to that?