Oops! Gigabyte spills the beans on AMD’s unannounced Ryzen 9000 CPUs

Wondering what the numbering system for the next-gen AMD CPU you buy for your AM5 system will be called? Me too — frankly the names and numbers for modern CPUs make my head spin. But we have reliable information that the company is going with “Ryzen 9000” as the family name for the upcoming models, widely expected to debut later this year.

That’s according to motherboard manufacturers, including Asus, MSI, and now Gigabyte, quoting a report from VideoCardz.com. Asus and MSI simply said their boards will support “AMD’s next-gen CPUs, but Gigabyte specifically stated “Ryzen 9000.” Though the upcoming AMD “Granite Ridge” processors will be based on a new Zen5 architecture, they’ll still be using the popular AM5 socket, and should therefore work with existing AM5-based motherboards as long as you make sure and update the BIOS.

If you’re scratching your head about why Ryzen 9000 is following Ryzen 7000, you’re not alone. There are Ryzen 8000-series desktop chips based on the Zen4 architecture, but they’re primarily G-series APU designs meant to efficiently combine CPUs and GPUs with powerful integrated graphics. They aren’t the chips you pick for a gaming PC or high-power media machine. Instead, Ryzen 8000 was largely a laptop series, similar to Ryzen 4000 a few generations ago.

Ryzen 9000 will be the new series you’re looking for if you’re hoping to build an AMD-based gaming desktop in the latter half of this year and into 2025, at least if you want the bleeding edge of performance. (If AMD follows its recent pattern, Granite Ridge “X3D” processors with extra V-Cache will probably be released sometime in late 2024 or early 2025.) Of course, existing Ryzen 7000 series CPUs — and even some still-pretty-great 5000 CPUs for the long-lasting AM4 platform — will still be widely available.