AMD must have stated a million times (slight exaggeration) that Zen 3 will be available this year, but what they have not done until this point was to promise an actual date. Well, that just happened. Well, that's about it. In what promises to be an "exciting fall for gamers," AMD is planning two separate events in October, one to finally and officially unveil Zen 3 and the other to announce its next-generation Radeon RX 6000 graphics lineup based on RDNA 2 The other is to announce the next generation Radeon RX 6000 graphics lineup based on RDNA 2. AMD will then announce the "next wave of Ryzen desktop processors" based on Zen 3 (Ryzen 4000 series on desktops). And on Wednesday, October 28, also at 12:00 pm ET, AMD will announce the Radeon RX 6000 series and talk about "deep collaboration with game developers and ecosystem partners."

In short, this is going to be an exciting month; AMD has not kept Zen 3 a secret, previously stating that it would deliver performance "comparable to what you would expect from an entirely new architecture." We expect a 10-15% IPC improvement over the current Zen 2 CPUs (Ryzen 3000 series, desktop), but it will be interesting to see what exactly AMD has in store. More cores? Additional features? Everything is on the table.

Prior to the announcement, one thing we know about Zen 3 is that it will run on existing 400 and 500 series motherboards. This was not the case initially; AMD had initially decided not to support 400 series chipsets, but changed course after hearing feedback from owners of previous generation motherboards.

As for RDNA 2, given that Nvidia just swung off the fence with the Ampere announcement (GeForce RTX 3090, 3080, and 3070), this is definitely of more interest; to see AMD's response will feel like a long wait until the end of October. Nvidia seems to be setting the bar high, claiming that even the $499 GeForce RTX 3070 will outperform the previous generation GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, which debuted at $999.

If Nvidia's claims are true, AMD has some room to grind. With the new GPU, informally known as Big Navi, AMD is expected to offer comparable performance at an equally attractive price.

RDNA 2 is the same graphics architecture that powers both the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, both of which will be released in November; AMD is hoping that its next-generation GPUs will offer the same level of performance as Nvidia's Turing GPUs, a feature Nvidia introduced with its real-time ray tracing, a feature introduced by Nvidia in its Turing GPUs. So between catching up with the competition on traditional rasterized rendering and ray tracing workloads, this is an important announcement for AMD.