Today, AMD announced its AM5 and Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 lineup of desktop processors at Comutex 2022. The processors are set to release this fall, and AMD is updating quite a bit with its Zen 4 lineup, including dropping its manufacturing process to 5nm, supporting both PCIe 5.0 and DDR5, as well as hitting a 5.5GHz clock speed. All of this delivers insane performance, according to AMD, and might entice you to upgrade come this fall. Keep reading for more.
Ryzen 7000 takes center stage with better PCIe 5.0 support than Intel
AMD’s Zen 4 lineup of Ryzen 7000 processors delivers a world’s first according to AMD, as it’s the only PC processor that uses 5nm cores. It also marks a first for AMD in that all processors will have integrated RDNA 2 graphics this time around, as well as support for DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 controllers. This time around, however, PCIe 5.0 support is insanely robust, unlike Intel’s implimentation.
There are three board chipsets being announced alongside Zen 4 with the B650 X670 and X670 Extreme for Ryzen 7000 CPUs. While Intel is limited at the processor level to 20 PCIe lanes with 16 being at 5.0 speeds and four being at 4.0, AMD is taking it a step further with 24 lanes of PCIe 5.0 bandwidth. Now, you won’t be able to use all 24 lanes at PCIe 5.0 speeds unless you’re on the X670 Extreme platform. Those on the X670 chipset will only have PCIe 5.0 for storage and the top x16 slot and those who opt for the B650 platform will be limited to PCIe 5.0 exclusively for storage. However, the option is there to unlock extra power should you need it.
In addition to this, AMD is also updating motherboard specs across the board for Ryzen 7000 processors. You’ll now get up to 14 USB 3.x ports with some supporting 20Gb/s transfer rates and up to four display outputs mixed between HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2. This makes your new AMD motherboard a more all-in-one platform than it ever has been before.
While we don’t know the exact processor lineup, we do know that there’s a 5.5GHz clocked processor that was demonstrated at the keynote, which is “more than 30% faster than the i9-12900K in a Blender multi-threaded rendering workload.” The thing with AMD is we don’t know if this is their top-of-the-line chip or if it’s something more mid-tier, and I wouldn’t put it past AMD to have something even more powerful in the works.
We’ll get more information about the full lineup of Ryzen 7000, processor specs, and pricing as the summer goes on, so stay tuned for all the details as they come out.
Electronicsforward’ Take
I’m very excited for AM5 to come out. Sure, it means I have to replace my motherboard…and processor…and RAM…and, wait, no, my cooler will still work, whew. But, either way, it’ll take a lot to move from AM4 to AM5’s Ryzen 7000, but it looks like it’ll be quite impressive once it does come out.
While I’m slightly sad to see AM4 being left behind, AMD did do quite great to support it for as long as they did. And now, it’s time to move on to bigger and better things. Only time will tell if AMD truly is going to take 2022’s crown for best processor, but they sure ran the show with the launch of AM4 last time around, so I’m holding out hope.
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