Enlarge / AMD’s Lisa Su holds up an early sample of a Zen 4 CPU. (credit: AMD)
AMD didn’t offer much news on its desktop processors at its CES press conference this morning, but it did offer a brief preview of its next-generation Ryzen 7000 processors and its Zen 4 architecture. These chips will be released in the second half of 2022 and will require an all-new motherboard with a new AM5 processor socket.
We know few details about the Ryzen 7000 CPUs, except that they’ll be built on a 5nm TSMC manufacturing process and that the sample AMD demonstrated onstage was running at 5 GHz (the current 5950X tops out at 4.9 GHz). We also didn’t hear anything about the AM5 socket that we didn’t already know—just that it will be a Land Grid Array (LGA) socket that puts the pins on the motherboard rather than on the bottom of the processor, the same as Intel’s desktop chips. We also know that CPU coolers made for AM4 motherboards should continue to work on AM5 boards.
AMD has been using the physical AM4 socket since 2016, but it still has a little life left in it—the new Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU is an 8-core, 16-thread chip that uses the AM4 socket and improves speeds by stacking L3 cache on top of the processor die, something that AMD calls “3D V-Cache technology.” This both increases the cache’s bandwidth and the amount of cache; the standard 5800X includes just 32 MB of cache, compared to the 5800X3D’s 96 MB.
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