The next few months are undoubtedly going to be an exciting time in the PC hardware arena. With three of the market’s biggest brands — Intel, AMD, and Nvidia — all set to release the next generations of graphics cards and processors, we’re about to witness a real battle of the titans.
The rumor mill has already been buzzing with speculation about the upcoming AMD Ryzen 7000, AMD RDNA 3, Intel Raptor Lake, and Nvidia RTX 40-series. Now, new leaks give us a bit of a clue as to the release dates and some of the prices of these products.
Raphael announce:8 launch:9AD102 announce:9 launch:10Raptor lake announce:9(official) launch:10
— Greymon55 (@greymon55) July 15, 2022
With little information to go by from the manufacturers themselves, the sources of today’s rumors are the usual suspects — well-known Twitter leakers Greymon55 and Kepler_L2. Greymon55 often speaks up about the release dates and specifications of upcoming hardware, and this time, the Twitter tipster had a lot to share, all in their typical, very concise manner shown above.
According to the rumor, next-gen AMD Ryzen 7000 “Raphael” processors will be announced in August and released in September. This is very much in line with various other predictions. Although recent leaks suggest that AMD might want to hold off on launching the next generation due to an oversupply of Zen 3 chips that still need to sell, even those pessimistic outlooks point to September as the release date for the Ryzen 7000 CPUs.
As we get closer to the launch, engineering samples and early benchmarks begin to crop up. Just today, a benchmark of the alleged AMD Ryzen 5 7600X leaked, showing surprisingly solid performance. The CPU managed to beat the flagship Ryzen 9 5950X by 11%. Depending on the pricing, the 7600X could turn out to be a real hit for the upcoming generation of CPUs.
Moving on to AMD’s greatest rival, Intel Raptor Lake is said to arrive shortly after, so our ranking of the best processors is bound to change very soon. Greymon55 speculates that Intel’s 13th-generation processors will be officially announced in September and then released in October. This may give AMD a considerable edge, but it does make sense for both manufacturers to avoid launching their products at the same time.
Greymon55 also had a bit to say about the next-gen graphics cards, namely the Nvidia “Ada Lovelace” RTX 4000 GPUs. Several sources have already predicted that the flagship AD102 GPU will be the first to arrive, meaning the high-end RTX 4090. The GPU is also said to be used inside a rumored RTX 4090 Ti and RTX 4080 Ti.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su.
The leaker expects that we will see an official announcement of the AD102 GPU in September, followed by an October launch — which pretty much aligns with previous leaks. However, the mid-to-entry-level graphics cards may have to wait longer. Greymon55 added in another tweet that they expect to see AD103, AD104, and AD106 in 2023. Nvidia is allegedly only launching the RTX 4090 for the time being, and possibly the RTX 4090 Ti, “depending on AMD.”
AMD may be the first to launch new processors, but according to Greymon55, it’s Nvidia that will have the upper hand in terms of graphics cards. AMD’s upcoming RDNA 3 GPUs are said to be announced in October and then launched in November. Depending on the extent of the RDNA 3 release, AMD could beat Nvidia if it will be able to supply some more affordable graphics cards, assuming that Nvidia really does only release the RTX 4090 this year.
Greymon55’s juicy speculation is supplemented by Kepler_L2 who chimes in on the possible pricing of the upcoming graphics cards. According to the Twitter leaker, the mid-range GPUs from both manufacturers should be reasonably affordable. Kepler predicts a price of $400 or less for the AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT and $500 or less for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070.
As always, treat this with a healthy dose of skepticism until the manufacturers themselves lift the veil of suspense and tell us what to expect. No matter the final outcome, the next few months are bound to be interesting with so much new hardware hitting the shelves.
