In recent developments, Linux's open-source graphics ecosystem is making significant strides to accommodate AMD's upcoming RDNA3.5 architecture, also known as RDNA3+ or GFX11.5. Mesa 23.3, a library in the Linux graphics software stack, is now being updated for RDNA3.5, marking a substantial milestone. This upcoming update is particularly tailored for the impending Ryzen 8000 "Strix Point" APU series, which will incorporate the Navi 3.5 architecture. While AMD has maintained secrecy regarding specific enhancements accompanying this refresh, we expect decent performance improvements. This includes the anticipation that the Ryzen 8000 APUs will feature an increased number of Compute Units (CUs), where the current highest number is 12 CUs, and the increase could bump that figure to 16 CUs. The official announcement of the Ryzen 8000 series is expected in early 2024 when we will learn more about its GPU configuration and performance.

AMD made its upcoming Ryzen 8000 CPU series official earlier this week during a "Meet the Experts" presentation - a roadmap demonstrates that this next-generation "Zen 5" + "Navi 3.5" mainstream desktop processor lineup is expected to arrive in 2024. Leaked information (from last month) points to "Granite Ridge" being AMD's codename for the upcoming processor product range, with high-end examples maxing out at 16 CPU cores across two CCDs. Benchleaks has recently spotted a pair of curious looking AMD engineering samples - entries have appeared on the einstein@home and LHC@home distributed computing platforms.

The mystery SKU seems to be a prototype CPU model that sports 8 cores and 16 threads - the AMD product number (OPN) for this unit is "00-000001290-11_N" which does not correspond to anything currently on the market. A Family ID of 26 is specified - Benchleaks theorizes that this number assignment is "Zen 5" specific - given that the existing Family 25 (19H) identifier was assigned to Zen 3 and 4. It should be noted that one of AMD's alleged test systems appears to have been running unreleased graphics hardware - a non-specific Radeon unit (with 12 GB of VRAM) is mentioned within einstein@home's information dump, this could be a potential mid-range RX 7000-series card. A Radeon RX 7900 GRE GPU with an unusually low video memory allocation of 16 GB is listed in LHC@home's entry.

AMD in one of its Meet the Experts presentations to the retail channel vendors, confirmed that the next-generation "Zen 5" architecture will see its desktop part branded under the Ryzen 8000 series. The company has known to skip a thousand-number sequence each generation for its mainstream-desktop series, the way it skipped Ryzen 4000 series nomenclature between the "Zen 2" based Ryzen 3000 "Vermeer" and "Zen 3" based Ryzen 5000 Vermeer; and more recently, between "Vermeer" and the "Zen 4" based Ryzen 7000 "Raphael," which makes this an interesting development. AMD's next-generation mainstream-desktop processor is expected to be codenamed "Granite Ridge," it will feature up to 16 "Zen 5" CPU cores across up to two CCDs. The processor I/O (and its 6 nm cIOD) is expected to be largely carried over, except that it could be upgraded with support for higher DDR5 memory speeds.

Another major disclosure is the very first mention of "Navi 3.5" This implies an incremental to the "Navi 3.0" generation (Radeon RX 7000 series, RDNA3 graphics architecture), which could even be a series-wide die-shrink to a new foundry node such as TSMC 4 nm, or even 3 nm; which scoops up headroom to dial up clock speeds. AMD probably finds its current GPU product stack in a bit of a mess. While the "Navi 31" is able to compete with NVIDIA's high-end SKUs such as the RTX 4080, and the the company expected to release slightly faster RX 7950 series to have a shot at the RTX 4090; the company's performance-segment, and mid-range GPUs may have wildly missed their performance targets to prove competitive against NVIDIA's AD104-based RTX 4070 series, and AD106-based RTX 4060 series; with its recently announced RX 7600 being based on older 6 nm foundry tech, and performing a segment lower than the RTX 4060 Ti.