Learning from its past launches, AMD is no stranger to launch things in the last days of the quarter either but since the original launch date was scheduled for May 28, things should be quite ready by now.

It is pretty common for AMD to announce a product and ship it a month later, this is what happened last year when it announced the latest Ryzen at Computex 2019 and started shipping July 7 or 7-7 to take advantage of its 7nm lead.

Igor’s Lab got the alleged early sample clocks for 7nm Ryzen 3 based Vermeer and things are looking good for AMD. The clock speeds for the eight-core and sixteen-tread samples start at 4GHz for base clock and 4.6GHz for boost.

The eight-core/sixteen-thread Ryzen 3800X with Zen2+ cores already arrived with very close clocks, with a 3.9Ghz base and a 4.5 GHz boost.

The new 16-core/32-threads Vermeer clock starts at 3.7Ghz and the boost goes up to 4.6GHz. Currently, the fastest AMD Ryzen 3950X with 16 cores and 32 threads has a base clock of 3.5GHz and its boost goes to 4.7Ghz.

Obviously, AMD hopes to get quite a good IPC (Instructions per clock) boost from the new core, and our sources also shared that Zen2+ was introduced as Zen 3 was pushed back due to the original problems. All Zens up to Zen 4 are designed by Jim Keller, on the large-scale roadmap, while senior fellow Michael Clark was working on the details of the CPUs and took over when Keller left.

A while ago we chatted to Clark to understand who did what, and Clark confirmed that he was involved in the actual product design of the Ryzens and EPYC Zen-based cores.

We have to admit that Intel is doing quite well with its 14++ nm cores and it is expected that we will see a deca-core 10900K any day now. It remains to be seen whether the next Intel desktop, Rocket Lake S, comes with 10nm cores or stick with the proven 14++ nm cores. It is certain that Adler Lake S with a combination of eight big and eight small cores might be a step in the right direction.

When it comes to the CPU market and what Intel and AMD have to offer, late 2020 and 2021 won't be boring.