Leaks are starting to really shoot up around AMD’s inbound Zen 5 desktop CPUs, and we’ve just been treated to a (purported) photo of a sample chip.
Yes, as ever, maintain the usual skepticism around this piece of rumor, with the image being aired on X (formerly Twitter) as highlighted by VideoCardz.
We should be especially careful here, as there’s already been an accusation that this image is a fake (we’ll come back to that shortly).
VallahExperte claims this is a photo of an 8-core (16-thread) next-gen Ryzen CPU, so we could be looking at the 9700X (or 9800X, assuming the 9000 series is what AMD ends up running with).
However, as VideoCardz points out, the product ID appears to correlate with a 6-core CPU. When questioned on that, VallahExperte states that they were told this is an 8-core processor, but haven’t verified that (they haven’t actually tested the CPU, apparently).
Analysis: Faking it?
So, is this pic a fake or not? Well, VallahExperte is not a source we’re familiar with, it must be said, and there’s a possibility that any image leak could be dodgy.
However, the aspersion cast by French tech site Overclocking.com that this image was faked hasn’t itself been verified, and consists of a flimsy one-line update that someone on a Discord server engaged in this fakery. So, we must take that with some skepticism too – it hardly represents cast-iron proof. Not yet, anyway (and the French site isn’t one we’re familiar with, either, for that matter).
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What’s also worth noting here is that HXL, a regular hardware leaker on X, also chimed in on this, highlighting that a processor with the same ID has previously been listed as an engineering sample over at Einstein@Home (a project that aims to detect signals from neutron stars). In that listing, which was from a long time ago mind (mid-2023 in fact), it’s an 8-core CPU, so that seems to lend VallahExperte’s assertion some authenticity – or alternatively, shows where the fake ID was gleaned from.
Perhaps the latter is the more likely scenario, and we guess we’ll find out more on the fakery front soon enough – we’ll update this story when we do. But at any rate, we must also consider the increased amount of spillage around Zen 5 of late, including some more concrete leaks like a motherboard BIOS update. All of this does suggest that what could be Ryzen 9000 CPUs are set to turn up in Q3, and from what we can gather, maybe sooner in that quarter rather than later – with a potential initial reveal at Computex in June.
Time will tell, but with Intel’s Arrow Lake rumored to be pushed to the very end of 2024, or maybe even slipping to 2025, if Zen 5 processors are unleashed early, that’s going to be seriously problematic for Team Blue.
