AMD’s Ryzen 7000 CPUs will break the 5GHz barrier — and require a new motherboard

Image: AMD

In the fall, the company is planning a break with the past, and it thinks your need for speed might convince you to do the same. For the first time in five years, the company revealed a brand-new kind of board at the Computex conference. The upcoming Ryzen 7000 requires AM5 and some of the company's oldest AM4 motherboards can be updated to support it.

The company told us in January that the Ryzen 7000 are the first PC chips based on a 5nm process, and the AM5 platform is designed to support DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 out of the box.

The first desktop chips from the company will be able to boost north of 5 GHz. While playing Ghostwire: Tokyo,AMD showed off a 5.5 GHz clockspeed, matching the Intel Core i9-12900KS. Not that megahertz means much for performance in isolation, as both Intel andAMD have many laptop chips that can reach 5 GHz too, and that doesn't necessarily mean they're faster at tasks than a lower-clocked desktop.

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

The difference between Zen 4 and Zen 3 will be between clockspeed and generation-on-generation process improvements. The new AM5 motherboards can give the new chips up to 170W of power, up from 142W previously.

Image: AMD

Under the unusual rook-shaped lid of a Ryzen 7000, you will still see three chiplets: two 5nm Zen 4 CPU modules, and also a new 6nm I/O die that has now integrated RDNA 2 graphics. Robert Hallock, the marketing director for the company, says that if you need more muscle for work or gaming, you will only need a video card. Integrated graphics aren't very rare on either Intel orAMD desktop computers, but it hasn't been a guarantee.

The new X670 Extreme, X670 and even the more affordable B 650 will be standard on every AM5 motherboard tier, and there will be at least one speedy PCIe 5.0 NVMe storage slot. The kind of thing that might give us the mythical 1-second game load times that Microsoft promises, but won't necessarily deliver on day one, is already seeing 60 percent faster improvements in sequential read speed.

Image: AMD

It depends on the tier, you're sure to get it with an X670 Extreme, but it's optional for the manufacturer to include it on an X670.

The AM5 is offering 24 lanes of PCIe 5.0 bandwidth, and says these will have up to 14 USB 3.x ports, some of which will support 20Gbps. You can get up to four display outputs on your board, as well as being able to outfit them with HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.

Image: AMD

Will this be enough to lure enthusiasts away from the existing AM4 platform, which was so successful at attracting so many of them away from Intel? It's hard to fault the company for moving on. The company made five different architectures fit into the AM4 sockets over the past five years, instead of asking all those buyers to add a new board.

If you upgrade to an AM5 desktop PC, you won't have to give away your AM4 gear, because the new chip is compatible with existing AM4 coolers.

It isn't talking about specific chips you can buy today, but it will be releasing more information over the summer.