AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs could be delayed for a worrying reason
BIOS issues to blame for Zen 4 purportedly getting pushed back?
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
AMD’s Ryzen 7000 CPUshave 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 whopostedto claim thatAMDhas changed the NDA (non-disclosure agreement) to account for a postponed launch (as highlighted byVideoCardz).
As you may recall, multiple previous rumors contended that AMD was shooting for a September 15 release date forZen 4CPUs, following a launch event which hasnow 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 ofSeptember 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 againstIntel’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).
Get the best Black Friday deals direct to your inbox, plus news, reviews, and more.
Sign up to be the first to know about unmissable Black Friday deals on top tech, plus get all your favorite TechRadar content.
Whatever the case, with several sources now claiming that later in September could be when Zen 4processorshit 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 withTeam Red rumored to be shooting for a high volume of stockright 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’sRaptor Lake CPUsgoing 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.
Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).
AMD Ryzen 9800X3D overclocking potential shown: CPU hits jaw-dropping 6.9GHz, exceeds 1,200 fps in Counter-Strike 2
Gigabyte spoils AMD’s Ryzen 9000X3D surprise by leaking flagship 16-core CPU, which could be something special for gamers with X3D ‘turbo mode’
7 myths about email security everyone should stop believing
