AMD confirms Ryzen 4000 APUs will launch in 'early 2020'

Send them now to CES

AMD RYZEN 4000 series processors will arrive in "early 2020", according to Team Red's boss Dr Lisa Su.

These will be 7-nanometre accelerated processing units (APUs) built on the Zen 2 architecture, rather than a new suite of chips based on next-gen fabrication or core architecture.

Dr Su confirmed such chips would pop up early next year in response to a question posed by VentureBeat in a recent earnings call, seemingly shaking up the usual vanilla play-it-safe answers execs give usually give during such calls

"We're also pretty excited as we go into 2020. You'll start to see our next-generation mobile products, as well, coming in early 2020. You'll see 7nm mobile chips that have yet to come to market. That's a pretty strong portfolio," AMD's chip doctor said, which would suggest such chips could be shown off at CES 2020.

Su noted that work on the next-generation Zen architecture is also underway, with chips based on Zen 3 set to pop up at some point next year.

"We're well underway with Zen 3 as a follow-on, as well, for 2020 — lots of product activity," said Su. "Even though 2019 was a big product year, I think 2020 will be an even larger product year for us."

Given AMD debuted the Zen 2-based Ryzen 3000 series, the Navi-based Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT and likely has a third-generation Threadripper processor in the works that should arrive before the end of the year, 2019 has definitely been a busy one for Team Red.

And by bringing more chips to the market, we should hopefully see some more interesting desktop machines, as well as light laptops and hybrid 2-in-1s that aren't beholden to Intel processors or Nvidia graphics.

That being said, we still expect to see a whole slew of laptops and devices making use of Intel's Ice Lake 10nm processors as 2019 closes off and CES 2020 gets underway. µ