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AMD announced the AM5 platform and the Zen 4 "Raphael" CPU family at CES 2022, providing the second half of the year as the launch window for the new platform. The upcoming processors and AM5 platform will introduce support for PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 memory to the AMD ecosystem as well.


AMD is looking to take another technical leap forward and claim its edge over Intel with the upcoming Zen 4 chips, which will be based on TSMC's 5 nm process and are expected to offer another big advance in processing power. This allows AMD to cram more transistors into its CPUs, offering a 30% power reduction and an estimated performance improvement of 20-25% along with a 1.8-fold increase in density compared to the 7 nm process that AMD currently uses in its Ryzen 5000 chips.

New AM5 socket

The new AMD socket will switch to an LGA design, where the pins for connecting a processor to the motherboard are located directly on the motherboard, instead of the current PGA design that AMD has used in the past where pins are locked on the processors.

The AM5 platform offers support for DDR5-5200 (JEDEC) memory, up to 28 LANES PCIe (Gen 5 standard), NVMe 4.0 and USB 3.2 I/O lanes. A new feature called RAMP (Ryzen Accelerated Memory Profile) will allow DDR5 memory to be overclocked on the new platform, similar to Intel's XMP 3.0. We can therefore expect that DDR5 will offer an overclocking experience with much better compatibility than DDR4 on AM4 platforms. In addition, AM5 will only be compatible with DDR5, and we will not see DDR4 options like on the Intel Alder Lake platform.

From the first information available, it would seem that the current AM4 CPU coolers will also be compatible with the new AM5 socket, but it is always better to wait for the first tests to verify their real efficiency with the new platform.

As for longevity, AMD has stated that it wants the new AM5 socket to last at least four or five years, as already happened with the AM4 platform.

AMD Ryzen 7000 CPU Specifications

The CPUs will retain the chiplet design along with a large number of cores. The "Raphael" CPUs will be based on the 5 nm Zen 4 core architecture and feature 6 nm I/O dies.

The new Zen 4 architecture is expected to offer up to 20-25% IPC gain over Zen 3 and will reach clock speeds of around 5 GHz, as demonstrated by AMD at CES 2022. The Halo Infinite demo featured an as-yet-undisclosed Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 CPU running at 5 GHz on all cores (but the number of cores was not mentioned), meaning that the single-threaded clock speed could also be higher than 5 GHz. The maximum number of cores should remain 16.

As for TDP requirements, the AMD AM5 CPU platform will feature six different segments starting with the flagship 170W CPUs, recommended for usage in combination with liquid coolers. These processors will have aggressive clocks, high voltages, and support for overclocking. The high-end segment will be followed by CPUs with 120W TDP that are recommended to be used together with a high-performance air cooler.

Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs should also come with integrated RDNA 2 graphics.

There is still no information regarding prices, but the transition to the new manufacturing process and the current shortage situation in the semiconductor world will inevitably raise prices compared to the previous platform.

Full presentation at CES 2022

Here's the video with the full AMD roadmap presentation.