AM5 From AMD Has Leaked In Great Detail

AM5, the next desktop platform (and socket) from AMD has just leaked in great detail and, needless to say, there’s quite a lot for us to talk about! Now, on the one hand, hardware news is rarely all that exciting whenever we’re talking about motherboard sockets and the like. It just doesn’t move the needle much and, frankly, there’s a good reason why.

On the other hand, the AM5 platform from AMD is truly worth our time and undivided attention. It is the next step of AMD’s overarching, multi-year-long plan and, needless to say, if it works out even remotely well as AM4 did, “team red” will have an absolute winner on their hands!

The AM4 socket has been employed for four distinct generation of AMD’s Zen architecture, including Zen, Zen+, Zen 2, and the latest and (so far) greatest Zen 3. AM5, though, will offer a slew of surprises, some of which are truly surprising.

AMD AM5 | The Future Is Bright

First of all, AM5 will no longer be a PGA socket but rather an LGA one — the same design that’s been used by Intel for what feels like a lifetime. This means that AMD processors will no longer have pins but rather golden contact pads. Moreover, the premium X670 chipset (the one that’ll supersede the existing X570) will support dual-channel DDR5 memory with speeds upwards of 4800 Mhz. Some DRAM manufacturers are even claiming that speeds around 10 Ghz could be attainable, although you should definitely take those numbers with a grain of salt for the time being.

Furthermore, it’s still uncertain whether the AM5 platform will support PCIe Gen 5. It seems that AMD has decided to stick with Gen 4.0 for the time being, although that’s still an unverified bit of information at the time of this writing.

Finally, the Zen 4 architecture is expected to yield a whopping 25% IPC gain over the previous Zen 3 generation, with clock speeds around 5 Ghz. Higher core and thread counts are also on the table, thanks to the super advanced 6nm chiplet design that’ll be employed by AMD.

AMD AM5 | Let’s Talk iGPU Performance

This is perhaps the most interest bit for budget-conscious gamers and those who aren’t super demanding when it comes to GPU power. Zen 4 Ryzen APUs (codenamed “Raphael”) are expected to hit the market in late 2022, and they’ll boast RDNA 2 onboard graphics which should, by all means, provide huge gains over the existing Vega line-up. Now, AMD’s Vega iGPUs are already pretty darn impressive and are fairly sufficient for light esports gaming, so it’s fair to expect RDNA 2-based onboard graphics to truly deliver dedicated GPU levels of performance, especially when paired with obscenely fast dual-channel memory.

We’ll have to wait a fair bit before these APUs hit the market, but at least we know they’re coming our way and could, by all means, revolutionize the market yet again.

So, frankly speaking, it’s hard not to get hyped for what’s to come. The folks over at AMD seem to be working around the clock in an attempt to deliver across their impressive product line-up. And, if their recent string of mind-blowing successes is anything to go by, they’ll surely impress us in all the right ways going forward as well.