When it was announced that AMD will be making a B2 stepping for their current Ryzen 5000 series chips, there might have been a bit of excitement. But AMD themselves basically just said "hold your horses."
VideoCardz reports that the previously reported B2 stepping for AMD's Vermeer CPUs will not offer any tangible performance improvement over the base chips. This was after an insider by the name Patrick Schur tweeted about the B2 stepping on May 18th:
B2 Stepping for Vermeer?! 😮
— Patrick Schur (@patrickschur_) May 17, 2021
100-000000059-60_50/34_Y
3.4 GHz (up to 5 GHz)
Stepping: B2
Cores: 16
100-000000065-06_46/37_Y
3.7 GHz (up to 4.6 GHz)
Stepping: B2
Cores: 6
Speaking to the Polish hardware website Benchmark.pl, AMD confirmed that the B2 stepping for Vermeer chips was nothing but an effort to make current-generation processors more widely available.
Aside from that, AMD also stated that the new chips, which are due within the next six months, won't require a BIOS update.
Now that that's out of the way, it's still technically good news. This means that more people will be able to get a hold of the amazing Ryzen 5000 series of CPUs, such as the Ryzen 5 5600, which offer significant performance uplifts compared to competing chips from Intel.
In the midst of the global chip shortage, PC enthusiasts will likely take anything they can get.
What's Going To Happen To The XT Chips?
It was previously rumored that AMD is preparing for the release of XT series versions of two Zen 3 CPUs: the 5950XT and the 5600 XT, which can technically be considered a Ryzen 5000 refresh.
As stated in that tweet by Schur, the 5950XT was supposed to offer a 100 MHz improvement over the base 5950X's boost clock, allowing it to go to a max boost of 5GHz. There's no clock improvement of such caliber over the 5600X with the alleged 5600XT, however.
When it comes to the fate of the XT chips, it's still not confirmed whether they'll be released. For now, the only confirmation is that the B2 stepping won't perform better, like what Schur initially claimed in his tweet.
According to the official AMD statement to Benchmark.pl, though, the company does plan to move the current 5000 series to B2 over the next six months.
Just Give Us Ryzen 7000 Already
The latest information about the upcoming Zen 4 CPUs from AMD still point to a 2022 release, meaning people will still have to wait.
An article on PCGamesN reports that the Zen 4 chips, codenamed Raphael, are due to come out in the 2nd half of next year.
But maybe the wait will be absolutely worth it, right?
These next-gen CPUs will be on a very small 5nm process, which could mean that the IPC improvement is going to be massive compared to Ryzen 5000, which was made on 7nm. There's also going to be support for PCIe 5.0 and super-fast DDR5 memory.
Until then, enthusiasts will have to settle for Ryzen 5000, which is absolutely not a bad thing anyway.
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by RJ Pierce
