AMD AM5 motherboards to arrive in Q2 2022, Raptor’s Lake Z790 series in Q3 2022

Intel Raptor Lake Z790 arriving after first AMD AM5 motherboards

According to a new rumor, Intel will indeed claim first place in the DDR5 memory race, but AMD’s AM5 platform will be ‘just’ two quarters away.

The rumor came from PJ, who is an editor and reviewer at Uniko’s Hardware. This website has previously provided information that has turned out to be true, so it’s definitely worth checking out. The tweet that was posted by PJ is quite short, but it provides some interesting information on a possible launch timeline for the most important motherboard series in the coming year or so.

AMD Raphael and Intel Alder Lake-S CPUs, Source: @ExecuFix & VideoCardz

Intel Z690 for Alder Lake in Q4 2021

PJ confirms that Alder Lake’s high-end Z690 platform will launch already in the fourth quarter of this year. This is obviously nothing surprising, as we have confirmed this easily with our sources. In fact, there are motherboard makers who claim that their Z690 series was ready for Computex and they were actually hoping Intel would allow them to show the new series at the expo. Unfortunately, that did not happen.

Intel B660 and H610 for Alder Lake in Q1 2022

It is said that mid-range B660 and low-end H610 series are now planned for early 2021, more precisely the first quarter. This would confirm rumors that Intel is indeed planning to launch the high-end Alder Lake SKUs first before revealing models with fewer cores.

Intel Z790 for Raptor Lake in Q3 2022

Furthermore, it is said that the Z790 series, which are to feature the exact same socket type (LGA1700) are now scheduled for the third quarter of 2022. Granted, this does not mean that the new motherboard series will launch at the same time as Raptor Lake CPUs because the Z790 series shall support both 12th Gen Core as well as 13th Gen Core through the same socket. In fact, we could be looking at the same situation as we had with the Z590 series and delayed Rocket Lake-S launch. However, one would guess that Intel would like to respond to AMD Raphael at that point.

AMD AM5 (X670?) for Raphael in Q2 2022

Finally, the launch schedule ends with AM5 based motherboard supposedly coming in Q2 2022. At this moment it is unclear if AMD is actually planning to launch 600 series still with AM4 socket (think Zen3+/Refresh/Zen3+V-Cache etc.), or rather switch over to AM5 socket with new series. What should be interesting is that it was previously rumored AMD Raphael, the first desktop series for AM5 socket is now expected in the fourth quarter. It would not make much sense to launch the AM5 motherboard before the CPUs are ready, which begs a question, is Raphael coming sooner? Unfortunately we do not have the answer to that yet.

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