AMD Announces AM5/Zen4/X670E DDR5/PCIe5 Platform At Computex 2022

Dashing many of our hopes for a mid-year launch, AMD’s Computex 2022 keynote address confirmed rumors we’ve recently seen regarding its Ryzen 7000 series platform’s capabilities.

The presentation begins with a sub-15% gain in per-clock performance and moved on to show gaming at frequencies up to 5.5 GHz, the combination of which would destroy its current game-winning Ryzen7 5800X3D. Produced on TSMC’s 5nm die process, the chiplets are to be tied to a similarly shrunken 6nm-process I/O IC. Regardless of the I/O die shrink, it still somehow appears to have over 50% greater surface area than each of the chiplets it serves.

While promising to keep its Socket AM4 viable for the foreseeable future, the transition to LGA for its premier AM5 should not be understated, as it means that hamfisted builders will be damaging their motherboards rather than their CPUs during installation. Regardless, the inclusion of 24 PCIe 5.0 lanes (compared to Intel’s current 16) will be a welcomed boost towards the advancement of PCIe 5.0 storage. Other modernizations include an increase to 14 SuperSpeed USB ports, Wi-Fi 6E, and quad outputs for integrated graphics.

Leaning on its PCIe 5.0 announcement, AMD heavily implied that it alone would be the force behind a storage transition to the faster interface, listing a bevy of manufacturers that it said will be setting their product launches to coincide with the AM5 launch. AMD projects a maximum read speed of more than 50% over PCIe 4.0 storage.

All three levels of the corresponding chipset will at least support PCIe 5.0 storage, and manufacturers as large as Asus and as small as Biostar are already developing products for the X670E’s eventual launch.

Technology manufacturers are always great at picking the one benchmark that best illustrates their performance advantages, in this case with the top-model Ryzen 7000 series CPU beating the Core i9-12900K by up to 31% in Cinebench. While buyers looking forward to this advancement must continue waiting until this fall, other announced products–such as its Mendocino-codenamed shrunken notebook CPU–will take a bit longer to reach the market.

While we haven’t focused much on non-builder components, one surprising announcement was that Corsair would join the gaming laptop fray with its new Voyager, featuring a 16” FreeSync Premium 240Hz 2960×1440 display. There hasn’t been any word yet of any trade-in value for our first-gen Corsair Flash Voyager thumb drives.