AMD has officially confirmed that the recently uncovered B2 stepping of the popular Ryzen 5000 Zen 3 CPUs "does not result in improved functionality or performance". So any hopes that these B2 chips might be a refreshed "XT" version have kind of fizzled out.

It was only yesterday that the B2 step seemed to herald a faster boost clock for the Ryzen 9 5950XT. However, AMD officials issued a statement today via Benchmark.pl.

"As part of our ongoing efforts to expand our manufacturing and logistics capabilities, AMD will be gradually switching to the B2 revision of the AMD Ryzen 5000 series desktop processors over the next six months. The B2 revision does not provide any feature or performance improvements and does not require a BIOS update.

According to Google Translate, yes.

This means that the Ryzen 5000 CPU will not be getting faster in the next 6 months in the form of an XT refresh, but perhaps this updated manufacturing process suggests that AMD will ease up on its struggles to bring its amazing CPUs to the world.

Ryzenberg, et al.

Less popular chips like the Ryzen 7 5800X were not too problematic to obtain, but the outstanding Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 5 5600X were much harder to find. If these new B2 steppings really do expand AMD's manufacturing capacity, it means that more Zen 3 chips will actually be available at retail.

However, this does not rule out the possibility of an XT version of the Ryzen 5000 CPU in the future. However, the potential Warhol 6nm series has reportedly been shelved, and it is not out of the realm of possibility that some slight improvements will be made down the road. However, if they do ship from TSMC's production facility, it could be at the end of the year.

Whatever the XT CPU series may end up looking like, anything that helps increase the number of AMD Zen 3 chips is fine by us.