With Ryzen well on its way after last year’s announcement, AMD is continuing to lay the groundwork to ensure its successful launch. Earlier during CES, AMD revealed some key motherboards and chipsets that would accompany Ryzen. We now have the details to go along with those chipsets as well as more information on the new upcoming CPUs.
Ryzen is more than just a single Zen processor but is more of an entire lineup. There will be several Ryzen CPUs out eventually but they will all share the common characteristic of being unlocked and overclockable. No Ryzen CPU will be locked and they will range up to the 8cores 16 threads we’ve already seen. I expect we will see 4 core and 6 core variants with some mixture of SMT enabled and disabled as well. In order to access overclocking, the specific AM4 X370, X300, and B350 chipsets are required.
Luckily for us, Ryzen will be coming soon rather than later. AMD expects to launch closer to the middle or early Q1 rather than late in Q1. This suggests that we would see a launch sometime in February or March. AM4 compatible coolers are also going to be available from day one to overclockers.
In terms of chipsets, in addition to the X370, X300, and B350, we also have the A320 and B300. The 300’s are a new type of chipset aimed at SFF builds, specifically mITX motherboards. This means we should be able to cram top end 8 core chip into the smallest cases out there. With AM4, AMD has changed the way I/O works with not only some PCIe lanes tied to the CPU directly but also some USB 3,1 and SATA/NVMe connections as well. It will be interesting to see the changes in the market once Ryzen comes along in a few short weeks.
I’m quite liking the look of these (although I’m not upgrading for quite a while as only full upgraded a few years back)… but there seems to be a distinct lack of sata ports on the specs. I know I’m odd one out having a high sata count (8 on motherboard and 4 via PCIe cards)… but still having only 2/4 satas seems a bit :-/
Perhaps it will have extra’s via additional chipsets (off CPU) but intel seems to be at least 6 (on CPU) and 2-4 (off CPU) on standard boards. I guess if the CPU’s have enough spare lanes, it wouldn’t be too much of a problem… but seeing as intel are finally starting the moves to SFF’s (U.2) from server setups, it would have been nice if AMD could have taken a leap over intel and say released all (2 or 4 sockets) SFF’s (assuming U.2 is compatible/the same as SFF-8087) to 4-way sata breakouts per SFF which would allow 8 to 16 satas or true SFF or SAS drives with higher speeds (I can’t believe its taken so long for SFF’s to hit the “user” market).
Hope the AMD Ryzen laptop chips come unlocked as well, in case the laptop has the thermal headroom for it. Their laptop CPUs have been very bland these past years.