AMD's Ryzen 4000 CPU based on the Zen 3 architecture may be in the final stages of development, Igor's Lab reports, with the Ryzen 4000 processor now reaching B0 stepping.

We do not know exactly where Igor got this information, other than vague hints from his inside sources. However, the Zen 3 is expected to be announced at the end of September, and AMD has officially confirmed that the product will ship by the end of 2020, so this is not entirely surprising news.

CPUs go through several steps during the manufacturing phase before finally becoming a shipping product. Commonly referred to as "steps" is how CPU revisions are measured, and every processor goes through two or three major revisions before production. Occasionally, extenuating circumstances can lead to a post-release stepping. For example, the hardware mitigation introduced to improve the security of Intel Coffee Lake chips was demonstrated in a stepping change.

Stepping nomenclature is indeed a loose science. It is only after the chip has been tested that one can be sure whether a new revision is needed, and hence there is no guarantee that the B0 stepping is the final version. However, since we are not too far off from the planned Zen 3 launch date, it may be unlikely that further revisions will be made before these chips are shipped to third parties and tested with the expanded Ryzen 4000-compatible components.

It may also mean that many benchmark databases online may be ready to spit out a fourth free preliminary performance data before the final release date of these chips.

Last year's Ryzen 3000 processors were found with B0 steppings just months before their final release, which could be interpreted as a good omen for the Ryzen 4000.

It will be interesting to see how AMD's Zen 3 architecture ends up in the highly competitive world of gaming CPUs. The company has promised an entirely new redesign of the architecture, rather than just an iterative update of Zen 2, but we'll have to wait a bit longer to find out what that actually means for performance.

But before it all begins, AMD has announced three new XT processors, the Ryzen 5 3600XT, Ryzen 7 3800XT, and Ryzen 9 3900XT. These chips will be available on July 7, 2020, at slightly faster clock speeds than the "X" previous chips.