An interesting rumour about AMD's upcoming Ryzen 4000 series (Zen 3) desktop CPUs has been published by Taiwan's DigiTimes, via Retired Engineer on Twitter. DigiTimes heard from its industry sources that TSMC's enhanced 5nm process (N5P) will begin mass production in Q4 this year, ahead of schedule. Due to this good fortune, the source says that AMD and TSMC have made adjustments to their plans and that the Ryzen 4000 series of desktop processors will be manufactured using TSMC N5P, rather than 7nm EUV. DigiTimes refers to this alignment of the stars as one that could precipitate "the biggest change in 15 years" for the PC competitive landscape.
Is this roadmap already out of date?
AMD has been kindling a close and comprehensive partnership with TSMC this year particularly as it has seen a "huge increase in sales" thanks to its successful introduction of Zen 2 architecture processors. Recently it benefited from the Huawei/US crisis, and AMD being able to take up this capacity has been good for TSMC's bottom line.
It is understood that TSMC has been producing N5 chips since April, and it will begin N5P output early. Expectations are that "enhanced 5nm Ryzen processors will put unprecedented pressure on Intel" which is even now still making processors using 14nm technology.
Separately, Nvidia's first 7nm graphics processors are said to be on the way to "full production" in H2 this year.
AMD Ryzen 4000 APU (Renoir, Zen 2) leaked benchmarks impress
Up and coming Twitter leakster RoGame has shared some interesting comparisons that he has data mined from the 3DMark online benchmark databases. In summary the new APUs look like they will be significantly stronger on the CPU side while GPU performance remains much the same intergenerationally.
The comparisons provided pit the AMD Ryzen 3 PRO 4200G with Radeon Graphics - against the AMD Ryzen 3 3200G with Vega 8 Graphics, and the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 4700G with Radeon Graphics - against the AMD Ryzen 5 3400G with Vega 11 Graphics.
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If you are wondering about these results, the new APUs feature more cores/threads and the newer process / architecture, meanwhile AMD has cut the GPU CU counts, while more or less maintaining iGPU performance.
Twitter's Tum Apisak has also been busy unearthing 3DMark benchmark results for Ryzen 4000-series APUs. In a recent tweet he shared purported FireStrike scores for the AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 4700G, Ryzen 5 Pro 4400G, and Ryzen 3 Pro 4200G.
