AMD unveils its new Ryzen 7000 CPUs and lineup of AM5 motherboards

AMD’s new Ryzen 7000 CPUs have now been revealed, along with a new generation of motherboards. These were announced at Computex 2022 where AMD shared plenty of details regarding its next leap in performance. From what we’ve seen, the Ryzen 7000 CPUs boast impressive numbers. Along with this news, the AM5 platform from AMD makes big moves toward supporting DDR5 and PCIe 5.0.

This signals a big push from companies to finally move on from older hardware. It’s especially true, since Ryzen 7000 CPUs will only be supported on these new AM5 motherboards. They’ll also only support DDR5 memory, meaning that this upgrade is all-encompassing. Users will need to buy a new motherboard and have DDR5 memory in order to make use of AMD’s next lineup of processors. Though, to be honest, that isn’t entirely surprising.

Big numbers from AMD’s Ryzen 7000 CPUs

The Ryzen 7000 processors will use the 5nm Zen 4 ‘Raphael’ architecture and provide “greater than 15% uplift in single-thread performance” compared to Zen 3 CPUs. These will also have up to 5GHz+ maximum boost frequency. In fact, during a demonstration of Ghostwire: Tokyo, AMD showed the CPU reaching 5.5GHz. This makes these CPUs on par with Intel’s Core i9-12900KS, at least in terms of clock speeds. Another demonstration showed Ryzen 7000 performing more than 30% faster than Intel’s 12900K in Blender.

(Image credit: AMD).

It was also revealed that a new 6nm I/O die that includes an integrated RDNA2-based graphics engine will be featured. So you won’t necessarily need a separate graphics card unless you want the extra power for gaming. Integrated graphics aren’t something that’s new, but it’s nice to have it there anyway.

A new lineup of motherboards

The AM5 lineup of motherboards is equally interesting. AMD announced three different options with the X670 Extreme, X670, and the B650. The X670 Extreme is the highest tier, and will support two PCIe 5.0 slots and one M.2 NVMe SSD port. Standard X670 motherboard feature sets will vary depending on different OEMs. But the B650 won’t make use of PCIe 5.0 at all. Instead, it’ll use PCIe 4.0 slots, making it the cheapest option out of the three.

(Image credit: AMD).

The general features available to each of the motherboards are 24 lanes of PCIe 5.0 bandwidth, 14x USB slots (the exact generation is unspecified), and support for up to four displays. AMD has also shown five flagship AM5 motherboards from ASRock, ASUS, Biostar, Gigabyte, and MSI. Each use the X670 Extreme configuration, and we’re likely to see others later down the road.

It’s clear that AMD is starting to make big pushes into its AM5 platform. However, the company is also aware of the existing AM4 user base. Some users may not want to step away from their current setups, and that’s something the company is aware of. AMD’s Marketing Director Robert Hallock even said the company wants “to keep AM4 going into the future” as time goes on. So, even though AMD wants to usher in a new generation of CPUs, it hasn’t forgotten about its older products.

AMD hasn’t gone into any specifics regarding particular CPUs just yet. But, as the months go on towards fall, we’re bound to see more information. We may also see AMD unveil its RDNA 3 cards in September.