AMD had been expected to begin mass manufacturing of the new Ryzen processor in April or May and because the Ryzen 7000 series features an entirely new socket design a 4-5 month gap in between manufacturing and launch seems feasible.

This means we will see Raphael in the early fourth quarter just in time to compete with Intel's 13th generation "Raptor Lake" Core processors.

For those not familiar with the Koran (Raphel is not predicted in the Bible), Raphael will be a multi-chip module consisting of "Zen 4" CCDs manufactured on the TSMC N5 (5 nm) node and a cIOD manufactured on an unknown node.

Packaging is done at a factory in China. The "Zen 4" CPU cores are projected to have increased IPC as well as faster clock rates. Next-generation connectivity, such as PCI-Express Gen 5 (with CPU-attached Gen 5 NVMe), and DDR5 memory, will also be available. These processors will be available in conjunction with Socket AM5 motherboards based on AMD's new 600 series chipsets.