With the introduction of the Zen architecture, AMD made promises that in the future they would deliver future generations according to the promised timelines in their product plans (eng. roadmap). All said and done, the company has launched several further developments in a frenzy, and next up is Zen 5, which will take over from today’s Ryzen 7000 series with Zen 4, which was launched in the fall of 2022.
Support for Future Generations of Processors
Even though these new products are entry-level servers, CPU support does not end here and the AM5 platform is supported until at least 2025. The next generation of AMD Ryzen desktop processors that will come out later this year will also be supported on this AM5 platform, so customers who purchase these servers today have the opportunity to upgrade to the Ryzen 7000 series successor.
AMD has previously released a presentation that can be interpreted as Zen 5 being launched either at the end of 2023 or early 2024, something that is now concretized by Gigabyte. In a press release about their new servers, which use AMD’s consumer processors to keep prices down, the company talks about future compatibility and with this they reveal that the next generation of AMD Ryzen processors will be released later in the year.
According to AMD, the Zen 5 architecture will be “completely new”, which should rather be interpreted as significant changes compared to Zen 4. Companies introducing a completely new architecture almost never happen, and here the original Zen was an exception, as AMD had previously had a failure in form by Bulldozer. Despite this, the parts that were considered good from the predecessor were reused. The transition to Zen 5 from Zen 4 is probably meant to be compared to the step from Zen 2 to Zen 3, where the lift in performance per clock frequency (IPC) was a surprisingly high 19 percent on average.
From the details that emerged from Zen 5, there will be a wider design with a new one front-end, which is the part of the architecture where the processor retrieves data from cache or primary memory and prepares it for execution. AMD also specifies special optimizations for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), as well as, of course, increased energy efficiency.
Something that makes Zen 5 extra interesting is the choice of manufacturing technology, or rather choices in the plural. With Zen 4, 5 nanometers from TSMC are used and Zen 4C will use 4 nanometers, which despite the name is only a slightly developed variant of the former. With Zen 5, AMD will continue to use 4 nanometers, but also 3 nanometers, which is a completely new process node. Moving an architecture from one technology to another is not a trivial matter, but an investment in development costs that number in the hundreds of millions of USD.
The fact that Zen 5 is launched on two different manufacturing processes opens the door for AMD to use the same architecture for two generations, where they relaunch the same one at 3 nanometers with a second one. Such a maneuver would increase energy efficiency, open up to accommodate more cores in a processor and possibly allow for higher clock frequencies.
In conclusion, Gigabyte emphasizes what AMD has already said, namely that socket AM5 is here to stay until at least 2025. A reasonable assumption is therefore that it will survive one more architecture after Zen 5 before they move on with a new platform. Coincidentally, this is the same year that the next memory standard, DDR6, is expected to be ready, which would require a move to a new socket.
