AMD Ryzen “Raphael” with Zen 4 can get power-hungry flagship

By the end of 2022, several hardware innovations are expected on the processor front, including AMD’s next step in the form of the next generation Ryzen processors and the new architecture Zen 4, which will be the company’s first new architecture in two years. So far, relatively few details about the architecture have been confirmed, although much more is known about the platform. It includes, among other things socket AM5 and support for PCI Express 5.0 and DDR5, with backward compatibility for DDR4.

In addition to this, the step is reduced to 5 nanometers, which may mean more cores for consumer models. However, sparse information from AMD does not mean that the rumor carousel stands still, where the Twitter profile is also the leak @greymon55 now says that the top models get the same number of cores, but step up in TDP value.

In his post, the leak specifies two models, where the 12-core variant is accompanied by 24 wires but remains at the same TDP of 105 watts (W) as the current generation’s top models. This is also consistent with previous rumorswhere there was talk of both 105 and 120 W. For the flagship model of 16 cores and 32 wires that is expected to replace the current Ryzen 9 5950X, there is talk of a TDP value of as much as 170 W.

It should be noted that TDP does not necessarily correspond to the power budget, where for example Ryzen 9 5950X specified 105 W means a power budget of 142 W. It is possible that AMD like Intel releases the reins for the power budget and makes the top model much more power-hungry next generation.

On Intel’s side, above all, the “Alder Lake” family’s top model Core i9-12900K has a sky-high power output, with as much as 240 W under multi-wire load. Provided that the TDP of 170 W is correct, it is not impossible that the next flagship from AMD will pull away and land a bit over 200 W.

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