AMD Allegedly Unveiling Ryzen 7000 ‘Raphael’ CPUs on August 5th

For months we’ve speculated on the launch window for AMD’s next-gen CPU platform, and now we have a date. The company has posted an online registration portal for an August 5th (Taipei time) “Meet The Experts” event. The topic of discussion will be the new flagship X670 motherboards from AMD’s partners. However, even though it’s the official AM5 socket launch, AMD’s portal says it will be “Supporting the recent launch of AMD Ryzen™ 7000 Series processors.” So mark it on your calendar: Zen 4 will likely be unveiled on or before August 4th US time, at 9AM PDT.

The event will feature PR reps, aka “the experts” from some of AMD’s partners. That includes ASRock, ASUS, BIOSTAR, GIGABYTE, and MSI. Each rep will likely give a walkthrough of their board’s features and capabilities, while hopefully showing off some new features. Naturally, overclocking will be top-of-mind for many watching. Since the boards shown by AMD are all touted as “flagship” models, we expect that to be covered in-depth. Also, two of the five boards that will be featured are X670 Extreme, which as the name states, allow for extreme overclocking. We’re very curious to see what that will entail, as AM4 wasn’t especially overclockable. AMD has already teased this too, as it showed a Zen 4 CPU running at 5.5GHz at Computex earlier this year.

The event will be a showcase for the motherboards shown below. It will detail “How the Socket AM5 platform and AMD Ryzen™ 7000 Series processors deliver unbeatable performance,” according to the landing page. It’s a given that PCIe 5.0 storage will be covered, as it’s eagerly anticipated by gamers and storage enthusiasts despite there being almost no drives available for purchase currently. AMD’s new memory overclocking profiles will also likely be a topic of discussion.

Another big question is whether any CPUs with offer 3D-stacked V-cache will be available at launch. AMD has already stated there will be Zen 4 CPUs with V-Cache. However, it’s unknown if they will be offered alongside launch CPUs. It might be analogous to the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which came out long after the original Ryzen 7 5800 was available. There have been periodic hints that AMD might launch more V-cache chips, but nothing has popped up yet.

The timing of the announcement is curious too, as nobody expected AMD to launch this soon. It previously stated Zen 4/AM5 would debut “this fall,” but that’s not until September. Therefore, it’s possible it’ll be showing off its new wares on August 5th, and they’ll go on sale in September.

Regardless, we’ll certainly be tuning in to see what AMD has up its sleeve. The launch of AM5 is one of the most highly-anticipated events in recent PC history. AM4 was a massive success for AMD, so it’s expected to keep the pressure on Intel with a hugely expanded feature set. Plus, AM4 was supported for six years, so this could also be the AMD’s platform for Zen 5 in 2024 as well.

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