AMD today celebrated 5 Years of Ryzen, with a special video presentation by John Taylor, AMD Chief Marketing Officer, and Robert Hallock, Director of Technical Marketing. The company confirmed that its next Ryzen processors will come out only in Q1-2022. These processors will feature updated CPU core complex dies (CCDs) that combine the existing "Zen 3" microarchitecture with 64 MB of additional 3D Vertical Cache memory. AMD claims that this change improves performance by anywhere between 4% to 25% for games, amounting to the kind of performance uplifts you’d expect from a new processor generation.
AMD did not reveal whether the updated processors will be branded within the existing Ryzen 5000 series, or newer Ryzen 6000 series. If you remember, the "Zen+" microarchitecture enabled AMD to come up with a whole new generation, the Ryzen 2000 series, despite models 4% IPC uplifts, albeit significant improvements to the boosting behavior, resulting in improved multi-threaded performance. What remains unclear is whether the updated "Zen 3" chips with 3DV Cache will herald a new platform, or whether these chips will be built on the existing Socket AM4 with DDR4 memory and PCI-Express Gen 4.
