Report: AMD's upcoming APU lineup includes Cezanne, Rembrandt, and Van Gogh; Rembrandt will support new I/O tech, but Intel's prospects don't look too bright

Last week, we reported about a roadmap put forth by known hardware news leaker Komachi pertaining to upcoming AMD CPU/APU launches till 2022. Now, Chinese publication Expreview has managed to gather some more information about AMD's upcoming chips and this mostly aligns with the information that Komachi had compiled earlier. 

To recap, AMD is expected to announce the Matisse Refresh CPUs, the Ryzen 9 3900XT, Ryzen 7 3800XT, and the Ryzen 5 3600XT, before it unveils the Zen 3-based Vermeer CPUs later this year. Vermeer's availability, however, will be mostly in 2021, and it will co-exist alongside Renoir desktop 4000G and Cezanne APUs. Renoir will be eventually succeeded by Cezanne, which will employ a Zen 3+GCN architecture across notebooks and desktop. This means one more generation of Vega APUs before we get to see Navi. 

Rembrandt will be the first generation to use an RDNA iGPU alongside the Zen 3 CPU and will also support next gen I/O technologies such as USB4, DDR5/LPDDR5 RAM, and possibly two PCIe Gen4 devices simultaneously indicating that a new socket is on the horizon. But the first signs of Rembrandt will be seen only in 2022. This further re-affirms that 2021 will not see any major CPU launches from AMD. 

Apart from Rembrandt, Expreview reports that Van Gogh would be an ultra-low power APU that would be competing with the Intel Y-series chips in the 9W TDP envelope. Van Gogh is likely to be a Zen 2+RDNA2 part for embedded systems and ultra-low power laptops. 

Finally, the report predicts that Intel will likely have a relatively tough time owing to their now-ageing 14nm architecture for mainstream PCs. AMD's roadmap is better poised to lead both desktop and mobile in the coming couple of years.

Intel's upcoming Rocket Lake-S will still be a 14nm part and 10nm+ Tiger Lake is not expected to really break any records although we've seen early benchmarks of the Gen12 Xe finally overtaking AMD Vega iGPUs. Alder Lake-S aims to bring the big.LITTLE-esque design to desktops and will use a combination of Willow Cove and Gracemont chips. Intel's 7nm tryst is expected to only begin with Meteor Lake sometime in 2022.