AMD Ryzen 4000 Series Launching Early 2020 & Zen 3 on Track, CEO Confirms

AMD's president and CEO Dr. Lisa Su confirmed this Sunday that the company will be introducing its next generation Ryzen 4000 series processors by early 2020. The roll-out will start out with the company's next generation Ryzen 4000 series mobile parts, which AMD plans to debut inside a plethora of new notebooks at CES in January next year.

These APU parts will introduce the company's 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture to the mobile arena, however the company isn't stopping there. Following mobile Ryzen 4000 series APUs will be the company's next generation Zen 3 Ryzen 4000 series desktop CPU parts in the same year.

AMD Ryzen 4000 Series Debuting Early Next Year & Zen 3 On Track , CEO Confirms

AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su speaking with Venturebeat.com

We’re also pretty excited as we go into 2020. You’ll start to see our next-generation mobile products, as well, coming in early 2020. You’ll see 7nm mobile chips that have yet to come to market. That’s a pretty strong portfolio. We’re well underway with Zen 3 as a follow-on, as well, for 2020 — lots of product activity.

This cadence follows what the company did in 2019, by first introducing its mobile Ryzen 3000 series parts in January -- in time for the yearly OEM refresh cycle -- and following that with its next generation 7nm Zen 2 based Ryzen 3000 series for desktops in the channel market.

This can be confusing because inside the same year we have had two co-existing product families based on different CPU microarchitecture generations following the same product series nomenclature. The desktop Ryzen 3000 series are based on 7nm and Zen 2, whilst the mobile Ryzen 3000 series parts that were introduced earlier in January of 2019 were Zen+ and 14nm based.

Next year, even though the desktop Ryzen 4000 series will follow the mobile parts, they will in fact be the first to utilize the company's next generation Zen 3 microarchitecture.

AMD Zen 3 & Ryzen 4000 Series CPUs Landing in Middle of 2020

Based on a recently released roadmap from the company the Ryzen 4000 series desktop parts are expected to launch by summer of 2020 and the Milan server family is scheduled to land a few months later in the second half of the year.

The Zen 3 core has already taped out earlier this year on TSMC's 7nm+ manufacturing process and will go into production next year. Zen 3 Ryzen 4000 series and Milan CPUs are expected to remain socket compatible with AMD's current platform, that's SP3 on server and AM4 on desktop. Which means if you already have a Ryzen system you will most likely be all set for a drop-in CPU upgrade next year with a simple BIOS update.

AMD Zen 3 Rumored to Deliver 8%+ IPC & 200Mhz Higher Clock Speed vs Zen 2

AMD's Zen 3 architecture is rumored to bring no less than an 8% increase in instructions per clock vs current Ryzen 3000 series desktop CPUs based on the Zen 2 microarchitecture. With Zen 3, AMD is maintaining the same 8-core per chiplet design that we currently see with Zen 2, with a few significant improvements to the cache hierarchy, infinity fabric and the clock mesh. Which would translate to lower overall cache latency, better performance per clock and higher overall frequencies.

Sources familiar with AMD's Chinese labs allege that the Zen 3 core will be capable of operating at roughly 200Mhz higher clock speeds versus its predecessor and that early engineering samples are already demonstrating better clock speeds than engineering samples of the past generation which should get Ryzen fans excited.

All in all 2020 is set to be one of the biggest years in AMD's history. With next generation CPU, GPU and next generation semi-custom gaming console chips all ramping up.

AMD Ryzen Desktop Generations