Leaked AMD roadmaps show plans for Zen 4 CPUs and next-gen RDNA2 GPU architecture

A couple of new AMD roadmap slides have leaked courtesy of Guru3D. The new slides are marked ‘AMD Corporate Deck-September 2019’ so they’re nice and up to date, whilst their content appears to be geared towards investors.

The roadmaps allude to AMD’s plans for Zen 3 and Zen 4 processor architectures, as well as the planned release of the RDNA Radeon graphics architecture.

We’ll start with Zen 3 and Zen 4, which represent the next two generations of AMD’s CPU designs. Zen 2 began shipping this year, of course, utilised for the AMD Ryzen 3000 series processors. Fabricated using 7nm, it was a significant process shrink from the design 14nm and 12nm designs used for Zen (Ryzen 1st Gen) and Zen+ (Ryzen 2nd Gen).

Zen 3 will evolve the 7nm design with greater optimisation and higher yields, culminating in the 7nm+ design which we expect to see in 2020. The design is complete for Zen 3 so AMD is progressing well towards the expected launch.

A little further afield we see Zen 4, which is still in the design process but is expected to launch in either 2021 or 2022, the x-axis labelling is a little shonky. Details aren’t exactly forthcoming on Zen 4, although we’d imagine a process shrink is on the cards. It’s either larger 7nm+ dies with more cores of a move to the 6nm EUV process.

Along with this we see a few more details eked out regarding AMD’s plans for RDNA. The new graphics architecture was introduced alongside the launch of the Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT, with AMD presumably seeing a lot of headroom for optimising performance. Considering RDNA is likely to be used for the next-gen consoles, it makes a great deal of sense for AMD to really knuckle down and support the new architecture.

Next-gen RDNA2 GPUs appear to be shipping in or before 2021, this time on the 7nm+ design processor. RDNA2 is currently in the design process and its arrival could be timed to coincide with the eventual launches of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Scarlett in late 2020/early 2021.