Rumor | AMD might shelve plans to launch Ryzen 6000 Warhol this year leaving Intel Alder Lake with a possible gaming advantage

Recently, we discussed about the likely performance gains that can be expected from upcoming AMD Ryzen 6000 Warhol and Ryzen 7000 Raphael processors. Warhol, also referred to as Zen 3+ or Zen 3 Refresh, is currently speculated to be an Intel Alder Lake competitor with supposed gains anywhere between 9 to 12% over Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 Vermeer parts. However, we are now getting to know that Warhol might never make it to market after all. Instead, AMD is thought to be considering focusing its energies on Ryzen 7000 Raphael.

This information comes via Paul from RedGamingTech citing insider sources, who claim that AMD has removed Warhol from its roadmap altogether. Another source seems to have indicated that he's been "hearing little about Warhol", though he doesn't seem to be completely sure of its cancellation. All in all, this seems to have been a very recent internal decision at AMD as the same sources have been fairly confident about Warhol's prospects earlier.

Now, AMD never acknowledged there's a Zen 3+ Refresh in the works. The company's official public roadmap only points to a 5 nm Zen 4 following 7 nm Zen 3. Even if AMD did have plans to offer a mid-cycle refresh like it did with previous Ryzen generations, it probably makes sense to scrap it at least from a customer's perspective.

As Paul rightly points out in his video, buyers have been waiting for months on end to get their hands on a Ryzen 5900X or a Ryzen 5950X. Though availability of parts has started picking up in many places, supply shortages are still real four months into 2021. Therefore, for a refresh to land just days or weeks by the time one eventually gets hold of the current generation may not augur well for customers.

However, from a business perspective, the decision to cancel Warhol may or may not affect AMD, and this is largely dependent on Intel's success with Alder Lake. Alder Lake's speculated ~25% IPC gains with Golden Cove big cores over Willow Cove may be significant indeed, but we also hear that there may be a clock frequency regression.

So, while it is very well possible that we may see Intel taking back the gaming crown, Alder Lake's rumored lower clocks may normalize the equation in a way that AMD may not have much of an incentive in actually introducing a new SKU line and waste silicon at a time when supplies are still recovering.

On the other hand, AMD may have to convince partners who normally anticipate such refreshes to keep doling out new motherboard offerings. Warhol would have been the last CPU generation supported on socket AM4, so board partners may miss out on the opportunity to refresh their existing X570 designs; it's not clear whether Warhol would have actually supported 300 and 400 series chipsets.

The above information is still rumor and speculation for now, so we would suggest readers taking all this with a big scoop of salt. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see what Intel and AMD have to offer in Q4 this year.

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