On Tuesday, AMD released an updated roadmap for its Zen 4 chips at its quarterly revenue announcement, including a slew of new processors for both desktops and laptops. Alongside Intel, AMD is one of the two leading x86 CPU-makers globally. The company announced its Ryzen 6000 ‘Rembrandt’ mobile processors at the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show as part of its plans to compete against Intel’s Alder Lake chips and Apple’s M1 line of ARM-based processors that have been earning praise ever since their launch in 2020.
AMD’s latest desktop CPUs compete with mainstream processors in Intel’s Alder Lake lineup, which the Core i9-12900K leads. It is an upgrade over last year’s Core i9-11900K and offers up to 16 cores and 24 threads. The Alder Lake line also includes the Core i5-12600K, which has been earning praise as one of the best gaming CPUs money can buy. As for AMD, its current flagship chip is the Ryzen 9 5950X, which comes with 16 cores and 32 threads. It has a 3.4GHz base clock and a 105W default TDP.
At its Q1, 2022 earnings call, AMD confirmed plans to launch a slew of Zen 4 ‘Ryzen 7000’ products, including ‘Raphael’ for desktops, ‘Dragon Range’ for enthusiast gaming laptops, and ‘Phoenix’ for thin and light gaming notebooks. Starting with the Raphael desktop chips, these will be based on the company’s new AM5 platform and targeted at enthusiasts and serious gamers looking for top performance from their computers. They will be released in the second half of this year, but the company didn’t give an exact time frame for their launch. They will be the first Ryzen chips to support DDR5 RAM and manufactured using TSMC’s brand new 5nm process node with 6nm IOD.
Dragon Range And Phoenix Laptop Processors
Coming to the Dragon Range and Phoenix processors, both of these lineups will be released next year. While AMD hasn’t officially announced most of its specs and features, a slide shared by Tom’s Hardware suggests that the Dragon Range will offer the “highest core, thread, and cache ever for a mobile gaming CPU.” According to rumors, the top Dragon Range chip could have up to 16 cores to compete against Intel’s Alder Lake-HX processors that come with a hybrid 8+8 design. These are also expected to support DDR5 memory and PCIe 5 connectivity, while their TDPs will be more than 55W.
Finally, the Phoenix APU lineup will utilize both Zen 4 and RDNA 3 cores. They will reportedly offer PCIe 5 connectivity like their Dragon Range counterparts but support LPDDR5 instead of the standard DDR5 chips for better efficiency. The chips will be more power-efficient than the Dragon Range processors and will have TDPs ranging from 35W to 45W, quite a bit less than the Dragon Range. Some of the specifics regarding AMD’s next-gen laptop chips are still a mystery but expect more details to emerge in the coming weeks and months.
