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At AMD CEO Lisa Su’s Computex keynote address, she disclosed how stable the AMD platform has been, while announcing a new one. The AM4 socket has been in continuous use and production since 2016—six years.
Given how fast this industry moves, that is an incredible feat to get that much life out of a socket over so many generations of processors—over 150 versions by Su’s reckoning. While that was sinking in, she then announced the AM5 socket and a new Ryzen 7000 Raphael Zen 4, a 5nm, 5.5 GHz, 16-core processor with 1 MB per core cache. The implication being, you mister and misses OEM can be confident this new socket will be around for a while, allowing you to amortize your motherboard engineering investment. And there will be powerful processors to take advantage of it.
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| AMD’s new Gen 4 Ryzen processor built with big and little cores. (Source: AMD) |
The Ryzen 7000 has 24 lanes of the PCIe 5.0, which will be welcomed by AIB and NVMe suppliers. The associated 5nm chipset will have 14 USB lines, which will be welcomed by end users and peripheral makers.
Obviously, there’s going to be a lot of news about this new CPU—already performance processes are being made. But we’ll wait until we can get our hands on one before we comment.
AMD had five major announcements at Computex.
- AMD Ryzen 7000 Series desktop processors: Built on the new 5nm Zen 4 architecture, the likewise new processors will double the amount of L2 cache per core and over 15% uplift in single-thread performance, resulting in an incredible PC experience. The processors will also feature a new 6nm I/O die, which includes AMD RDNA 2 architecture-based light-duty graphics and support for DDR5 and PCI Express 5.0.
- AMD Socket AM5 platform: Built for the Ryzen 7000 Series desktop processors, the all-new LGA Socket AM5 platform will work to bring more features to desktop computing. AM5 motherboards will be available in three different tiers with differentiated features: AMD X670 Extreme, AMD X670, and AMD B650.
- Mendocino processors: Featuring Zen 2 cores and RDNA 2 architecture-based graphics, the newest Ryzen mobile processors are expected to deliver a great combination of performance and value, with the first systems available from OEM partners in Q4 2022.
- AMD SmartAccess Storage: The newest addition to the smart technology family, AMD SmartAccess Storage helps to reduce game load times and accelerate texture streaming.
- New AMD Advantage system: Corsair is launching its first-ever laptop designed for gamers and streamers, exclusively with AMD Advantage.
Although sales have slowed from the artificial pandemic highs, and crypto has faded to the background, 2022 promises to be an exciting year in PC land with new CPUs and GPUs coming from the big three: AMD, Intel, and Nvidia (AIN).