AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs could be delayed for a worrying reason
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AMD’s Ryzen 7000 CPUs have been pushed back slightly in terms of the on-sale date when chips will hit the shelves, if further chatter from the grapevine is to be believed.
As ever, exercise plenty of skepticism around this, as the source isn’t the strongest – the Chiphell forums in China, but this has provided accurate enough leakage at times in the past. The rumor comes from a reviewer on Chiphell who posted (opens in new tab) to claim that AMD has changed the NDA (non-disclosure agreement) to account for a postponed launch (as highlighted by VideoCardz (opens in new tab)).
As you may recall, multiple previous rumors contended that AMD was shooting for a September 15 release date for Zen 4 CPUs, following a launch event which has now been confirmed for August 29 (this was the rumored date and it turned out to be accurate). Now, the release has been delayed to September 29, the aforementioned reviewer reckons.
They even provide a reason as to why this is apparently the case, with the slippage due to AMD having to further tweak and tune the BIOS, so evidently that has required a bit more work than anticipated.
Analysis: Trying to make sense of rumors upon rumors
Yes, this is a case of a rumored launch date which is rumored to be delayed, so we are firmly in ‘rumorville’ here. It’s entirely feasible that September 15 never was the date in the first place, and AMD was always shooting for late September.
That said, there have been quite a few mentions of September 15 as a possible on-sale date, so it’s certainly a possibility that this was the timeframe AMD was aiming for, if only tentatively, perhaps. Indeed, a mid-September release could still happen – but this isn’t the first gossip we’ve heard claiming that things have been pushed back to late September.
A launch date of September 27, just a couple of days off from this new rumor, has been floated by other sources, and that’d mean the Ryzen 7000 release would go directly up against Intel’s Raptor Lake unveiling (AMD’s way of running some kind of interference, maybe – we talk a lot more about the possible strategy behind this here).
Whatever the case, with several sources now claiming that later in September could be when Zen 4 processors hit the shelves, there’s more weight to this possibility than before compared to mid-September. It also makes some sense in that it gives AMD time to get more Ryzen 7000 CPUs manufactured ahead of the full launch, and with Team Red rumored to be shooting for a high volume of stock right off the bat, a bit more time may be required.
That’s not the reason given here, mind, which is that the BIOS needs further work. If true, the worry here is that anything that’s worth delaying the launch for could point to a thornier problem. That’s jumping to conclusions, mind, and there’s also the fact that this purported launch delay happened before AMD announced its big reveal. Hopefully that suggests nothing too major in the way of any potential BIOS hitch, as otherwise, Team Red might have rethought its whole launch schedule including the unveiling.
Even a delay to the end of September would leave AMD still well ahead of Intel’s Raptor Lake CPUs going on sale, with the latter rumored to be kicking off in October (around the middle of the month was the last we heard). So Team Red would still have a couple of weeks drop on Intel’s next-gen processors in theory, and if stock of Ryzen 7000 does arrive in plentiful quantities, a flurry of sales could happen even in a relatively short timeframe for those keen to upgrade to what will be a new platform for AMD – and one that’ll be far more future-proofed than Raptor Lake.
The worry of it being a new platform, of course, is the potential issues to be ironed out as such, and the hint of BIOS problems here could be viewed as a little unsettling in that light. Time will tell, as ever.