According to "motherboard maker sources," the AMD Ryzen 4000 CPU will be available this September; DigiTimes (via Tom's Hardware) reports that AMD's next-generation Ryzen desktop processors will be available in the fall.

According to the report, AMD had planned to unveil its Ryzen 4000 series desktop CPUs at Computex, one of the world's largest technology trade shows in Taipei. And in a way, that plan has not changed. While it is possible that the Red Team will choose the Taiwanese technology trade show as the venue for its presentation, the trade show itself will be held later in the year than originally planned. To ensure the health and safety of participants and exhibitors, TAITRA (the event organizer) has moved Computex from June 2-6 to September 28-30.

As one might imagine, most roadmaps are currently up in the air, but both AMD and Intel have stressed to investors that manufacturing will not be significantly affected. Nevertheless, the outlook for new chip launches may be a bit bleak, as the entire technology ecosystem surrounding new processors is currently a bit unstable.

Still, look on the bright side: by September, we may see a new generation of AMD processors based on the Zen 3 architecture. And that's no small generational shift. At least according to Forrest Norrod, boss of AMD's server division, this is "a whole new architecture. Sounds more like a jump from Zen+ to Zen 2 than from Zen to Zen+, if you ask me.

AMD has now removed all references to "7nm+" from the Zen 3 roadmap, and it is assumed that TSMC's enhanced 7nm node will be used in the new processor, rather than the more advanced N7+ (true 7nm+) design that silicon manufacturers have been working on.

While this node will not make extensive use of state-of-the-art EUV lithography technology like the 7nm+ node, it should still help to improve efficiency to some degree. This node step and any architectural changes AMD might make should contribute to a significant upgrade of an already impressive lineup of some of the best gaming CPUs available today, but at this point we can only speculate on their performance.

At the very least, it is likely that these chips will continue to utilize the AM4 motherboard sockets currently in use when they are introduced. However, they may be the last to do so.

From the other camp, Intel's 10th generation Comet Lake processors are rumored to be coming much earlier, announced on April 30 and available in May. With up to 10 cores and 20 threads, this chip is expected to rule the roost of pure gaming performance on a low budget. The question on everyone's lips, however, is how much power will it need to consume to get there?