5nm Ryzen 7000 and AM5 Unleashed at AMD Keynote

It’s weird telling you all this from my home, but since we haven’t been to Taiwan for Computex in a few years for obvious reasons, I guess this is that “new normal” we heard so much about. Alas, there’s always next year! I may be grounded, but AMD certainly aren’t, and they’ve just held their keynote, unveiling a huge wave of upcoming hardware!

AMD Keynote

Firstly, the new Ryzen 7000 desktop processors, which will be based on the Socket new AM5 platform and use their new Zen4 architecture. That alone is quite a wealth of hardware, new chipsets, new sockets, and new processors will give us plenty of new things to test later this year. AMD claim a 15% uplift in performance over their Zen 3 designs, but there are other perks, like a doubled L2 cache, and boost frequencies over 5.5 GHz, so these chips should really fly!

AM5

The release of Socket AM5 means a greatly improved I/O, allowing for DDR5 memory, PCIe Gen 5, and simply more performance and bandwidth than previous generations. That includes 14 USB 20 Gbps ports, improved onboard graphics in most of the new CPUs, more DisplayPort and HDMI connections on the motherboards, and built-in MediaTek WiFi 6E and Bluetooth WLAN. Furthermore, the I/O hardware is now based on a 6nm process vs the older 12nm design, while the CPUs now use a new 5nm CCD. All this combined is likely what is giving AMD the 15% gains they’re claiming. However, AMD has been working with Phison for PCIe Gen 5 M.2 storage, so expect more news on this from vendors soon enough.

Availability

Due to launch in Fall 2022, we can expect to see X670E, X670 and B650 motherboards hitting the market with AM5 sockets. That will be the extreme, high-end and standard performance ranges respectively. No doubt we’ll have details of the new CPU, motherboard and new compatible hardware such as storage, memory and graphics cards over the coming weeks.