The AMD Zen 4 has long been rumored to be the successor to AMD's popular Zen 3 architecture, and it has been delivering phenomenal performance in the Ryzen 5000 series of AMD CPUs.

AMD's latest generation Ryzen CPUs have proven to be powerful and efficient enough to compete with Intel's competing 11th generation Tiger Lake CPUs, in part because AMD and its manufacturing partner TSMC were able to move the Zen 3 chip process to 7 nanometer process for Zen 3 chips to 7 nanometers. This allows more cores to be packed onto a single wafer, which seems to give AMD's CPUs an edge over many of its competitor Intel's CPUs, which still use the 10nm process.

In fact, AMD's success with the Zen 3 chip has been so compelling that we gave AMD Best Brand honors in our Tom's Guide Awards 2021. We applauded AMD's success in getting major laptop brands like Razer and HP to incorporate Zen 3 CPUs into their flagship notebooks, marking it as a company to watch for 2022.

One of the big things we are watching is the release of the Zen 4 chip architecture; read on for our latest insights on AMD's Zen 4 chip.

AMD has been fairly tight-lipped about the technical specifications of the Zen 4 so far, but some details have leaked out from reliable sources.

For starters, it's a pretty safe bet that AMD's next-generation Zen chips will be manufactured using a 5-nanometer process; in early 2021, chip industry enthusiasts in Chipsandcheese are expecting AMD's partner TSMC to move to 5nm for the Zen 4, with the company's own chips being manufactured on the same process, published a report claiming that early engineering samples of Zen 4 server chips were benchmarked to be 29% faster than comparable Zen 3 server chips with the same core configuration and clock speeds.

The Zen 3 relies on a 7-nanometer chip, partly because it cannot have as many cores on the same chip as the 5nm Zen 4 CPU.

The move to the 5nm process is a big win for AMD, which has already had great success with its 7nm Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 series chips. The chips are widely seen as more powerful than competing Intel 11th generation Tiger Lake CPUs, which are manufactured on a 10nm process.

AMD's chips are also expected to perform better thanks to TSMC's new chiplet technology. This chiplet technology is the path AMD has laid out in its 2021 Computex keynote speech to pack even more processing power into its chips. Simply put, by integrating this new chiplet design, AMD will be able to vertically stack more components (such as memory and logic units) on each chip.

AMD has not yet confirmed an official release date for the Zen 4 chip, but based on the company's track record and current leaks, we can make a fairly detailed prediction: AMD announces a new Zen architecture approximately every year, usually about every 14 months, and Zen 3 is announced in November 2020, so it is reasonable to expect the Zen 4 chip to be released in the first quarter of 2022.

Of course, with the global COVID-19 craze and ongoing chip shortage throwing multiple spanners in the works for most tech companies, it is reasonable to expect that AMD may deviate a bit from its product release pattern.

Some well-known chip industry watchers and leakers have indicated that AMD may delay the release of its Zen 4 chip until the last quarter of 2022, and (if that is true) competitor Intel will release the current Intel near the end of 2021 release of its 12th generation Alder Lake chips, which are expected to offer significant performance gains over the Tiger Lake 11th generation CPUs, giving it plenty of time to catch up. If AMD waits until the end of 2022 to release its Zen 4 CPUs, Intel may even have time to release its rumored 13th generation Raptor Lake CPUs.

Not surprisingly, AMD has not revealed any details about the Zen 4 processor's price at this time. This is because it will largely depend on when the company releases it and the state of the global chip industry at that time.

Based on past AMD product releases, the low-end of the Zen 4 chip (e.g., a quad-core Ryzen 3 CPU) could sell for between $130 and $170 in the U.S. AMD currently sells a high-end Ryzen 9 5950X CPU starting at $800. Given that the more powerful model could easily cost several hundred dollars.

AMD has become much more dominant in the desktop and laptop CPU market over the past year or so, thanks to the impressive performance and efficiency of its recently released Ryzen chips.

Much of that success is thanks to the company's 7nm Zen 3 architecture, so the prospect of new AMD chips built on the 5nm Zen 4 architecture should cause concern for competitor Intel. If AMD takes until the end of 2022 to ship Zen 4 chips, Intel may have a chance to regain market share with its upcoming 12th and 13th generation CPUs, but the power and efficiency gains that could be seen in the Zen 4 Ryzen CPUs could make AMD potentially establish itself at the top of the CPU market.

Regardless of how things play out between these two giants, 2022 is shaping up to be an exciting year for PC performance enthusiasts.