No no no. I'm not talking about releasing CPUs that have taped out years ago. That will last for a very very long time. AM4/Zen 3 is also super popular and will print money until 2025 easily.
I'm talking about R&D going back to the drawing board for new CPUs. That bit doesn't make sense.
R&D -> Tape Out -> Production -> Reach target inventory -> Release to reviewers/distribute to sellers -> Resupply sellers
Starting with "Order production", 90% of the job belongs to TSMC. TSMC doesn't care to produce stuff that's 10 years old. Their machines do the job anyway.
R&D to tape out is a completely different business. You could say that the red part is AMD and the black is TSMC.
I can absolutely see AM4 lasting until 2028, heck you can find AM3 hardware in some places. I don't think you'll find ANYTHING like AMD bothering to bring people back into R&D work for AM4 an entire year after their last CPU taped out. Everyone is on DDR5, AM5-based stuff or other server sockets. The DDR4 era is dead and gone. It'd make no sense to go to back there.
That's the thing with this rumored CPU...
The prospective/rumored 5600X3D isn't anything actually new. As others have posited, it could easily be 'poorly binning' 5800X3Ds.
It was heavily implied (to the verge of a promise) that there'd be additional AM4 X3D Vcache CPUs; that was well over a year+ ago. There's no R&D, etc. going on with this rumor.
(It's really not at all uncommon for embedded/industrial products to 'not go EoL' until years after the consumer line-up is 'retired from mainline sales'.
So, towards your PoV: AM4-consumer may be EoL'd well-before AM4 in its entirety is EoL'd)
I dunno man, you can run pretty much any game off a 35W CPU with a 60 fps target, so it seems really odd. But if these CPUs do indeed end up being used in arcade boards, then I suppose we will have some pretty amazing arcade games coming up. Shame none of them will be cooler than an After Burner II deluxe cabinet.
Not arcades. "Gaming" in a multi-national corporate sense means "Gambling".
I first became aware of this when I was stumbling upon odd SKU graphics cards and embedded boards, years ago.
Like you, at first I thought I'd stumbled upon 'arcade' parts; nope, slot- and video poker machines...
I was last in a casino over 2 years ago, and some of the machines were easily 2+ years old at that time. However, even the 'most basic, modern' video slot machine was clearly using a laundry-list of post-processing effects, and some even "3D displays" with very high DPIs.
Also, all those machines at least looked like they were solid 60+hz/fps; the animations were VERY smooth (probably to emulate a real slot machine, lol).
Ya don't think about it much-ever, but it's staggering the amount graphical horsepower needed for 'simple' electronic gambling machines. (...and that's just the US-prospective. IIRC, Pachinko machines are big on graphics too)
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