Veteran chip maker AMD is reportedly gearing up for a massive Ryzen CPU launch in the near future, in a bid to hit Intel where it hurts. If the latest rumor is to be believed, the AMD Zen 5 CPU launch will not only beat Intel to its Arrow Lake launch, but will do it by several months, in what’s described as a “show of force” against as a competitor.
AMD is already in a very strong competitive position, with the Ryzen 7 7800X3D easily being the current best gaming CPU, while Intel’s latest 14th gen chips are still floundering on Intel’s old Raptor Lake architecture. Intel can still make a good show of brute force, but AMD is winning the battle in terms of cost, power draw, and especially gaming performance.
This latest Zen 5 release date rumor comes from tech leaker extraordinaire Moore’s Law is Dead in the video below, where he quotes one of his inside sources as saying that “all evidence continues to suggest that Zen 5, possibly across multiple segments around the same time as a show of force, is set for launch in Q3 2024!”
Those multiple segments reportedly involve several products designed to hit Intel hard across several market areas, including a 192-core EPYC CPU, desktop AM5 CPUs, and mobile Zen 5 CPUs all being announced at the same time.
Q3 refers to the third quarter of the year, which means we could see AMD’s new CPUs being announced any time between July and September this year. Meanwhile, Intel’s Arrow Lake CPUs aren’t expected to be released until Q4 near the end of the year. However, both AMD’s Lisa Su and Intel’s Pat Gelsinger are lined up for keynotes at Computex in June 2024, where details of both companies’ forthcoming desktop CPUs are expected to be revealed.
If these timelines do indeed turn out to be correct, then AMD would have a big headstart on its competitor. Not only that, but Moore’s Law is Dead rightly points out that if AMD can launch Zen 5 three months before Arrow Lake, then it could even have its X3D chips with 3D V-cache ready to combat Arrow Lake when it eventually comes out.
AMD’s X3D CPUs have a massive stack of cache that reduces latency and the need to page to system memory, and has been proven to provide a substantial performance boost in several games in our tests. At the moment, the only way Intel can compete with AMD’s gaming performance is with the massive clock speeds seen on its latest CPUs, such as the Core i9 14900K and new 14900KS.
It looks like 2024 is gearing up for an epic showdown between these two CPU makers, and healthy competition can only be good for gamers looking for the best deal. In the meantime, if you’re looking to construct a new gaming rig yourself, check out our guide on how to build a gaming PC, where we take you through every step of the process.