Rumor mill: We could soon see a new line of desktop processors from AMD---but you might want to hold your excitement. Rumors claim that the company will be refreshing its current Ryzen 5000 CPUs with XT variants, as was the case with the underwhelming Ryzen 3000XT series.

News of the Ryzen 5000 (Vermeer) processor refresh comes from Twitter user Patrick Schur, who has included two Processor Model Number codes for the unreleased SKUs. As with the Ryzen 3000XT line, the new processors, which Schur refers to as the B2 stepping for Vermeer, appear to offer almost no changes apart from a very slight boost to the clock speed.

The 100-000000059-60_50/34_Y model is likely to be the Ryzen 9 5950XT. It has the same 16 cores/32 threads and 3.4 GHz base clock as the Ryzen 5950X, along with all the other Zen 3 perks. The only difference is the boost clock increasing from 4.9 GHz to 5.0 GHz.

The 00-000000065-06_46/37_Y model is expected to be the Ryzen 5 5600XT. This has exactly the same specs as the 5600X version---3.7 GHz base/4.6GHz boost---so it's either an early engineering sample or it might just be a model replacement and not an XT part at all.

AMD released a Ryzen 3800XT during its previous refresh, though it's unclear if a 5800XT will arrive this time.

The Ryzen 3000XT series released last June, meaning AMD could do the same with the Zen 3 versions. Next month may also see the launch of the X570S motherboards.

We were far from impressed by last year's Ryzen 3000XT chips, given that that they offer virtually no improvements over their predecessors, and it's hard to imagine the 5000XT CPUs fairing any better. It would be nice to believe that they'll at least lead to lower Ryzen 5000-series prices and more general availability, but that's probably just wishful thinking in the current climate.