As we know Advanced Micro Devices is the company that first started to roll out the support for PCIe 4.0 protocol for its motherboards and processors. And to the disappointment of most of us, the company will not be supporting the new PCIe 5.0 out of the box for its new socket AM5 motherboards. This news comes from various leaks and rumours and even AMDs statements at many times show us that this piece of information remains true to a certain extent.
According to sources, the recently leaked documents from Gigabyte’s latest mishap, clearly indicated that AMD decided to stay off the PCIe 5.0 wave with its upcoming AM5 CPU socket designed for its codenamed ‘Raphael’ processors.
Let’s first discuss the AMD’s socket AM5 and get a clear idea as to why AMD decided to wash its hands off the new market standard for the time being. The AMD socket AM5 has as many as 28 PCIe lanes and those lanes run the PCIe 4.0 version protocol, which is the current standard market protocol today.
Out of offered 28 lanes, 16 are devoted to the PCI express slot for graphics expansion, and four are for an M.2 SSD, with four more lanes for SATA expansion, and the remaining four for chipset communication with the socket.
However, AMD’s biggest rival intel announced on its Intel architecture day, that the company’s upcoming Alder Lake series of processors will deliver PCIe 5.0 connectivity. The interesting thing here is that Alder Lake is expected to go head to head with AMD’s Raphael, and the advantage of having new technology in the mix will certainly give intel a clear lead over its rival.
That, of course, doesn’t mean that Intel will force its OEMs to integrate PCIe 5.0 standard. This means that even if your processor comes with support for PCIe 5.0 it depends on the OEM of your motherboard to offer the support for the latest technology as well. And since AMD has decided to stay put from PCIe 5.0 with its Raphael I doubt there will be many motherboard OEMs who will introduce the technology any time soon.
