AMD’s AM5 platform to miss out on this important feature that Intel Alder Lake will bring

When the silicon industry is getting pretty heated up, we talk about next-generation for both AMD and Intel. While AMD was dominating sales pretty single-handedly for the last 2-3 years, it seems finally the team Red will face some competition from team Blue with Alder Lake.

Intel did have an embarrassment to cover with the worst launch of the Rocket Lake-S desktop CPUs, so they focus more on their upcoming 12th Gen Alder Lake processors based on the 10nm process. It brings a new big.LITTLE architecture with small cores and performance cores along with features like PCIe Gen5 and DDR5 memory support.

However, AMD is facing chip constraints as they are dependent on TSMC while Intel has an advantage over their own plants. However, architecture wise 6nm based Zen 3+ is not happening for desktop as per rumours, while it’s happening on laptops as per rumours.

While we have seen the leaked X570S motherboards, it seems soon AMD will finally ditch the much-loved AM4 socket. A reliable leaker ExecuFix has recently provided information about the AMD AM5 platform, stating that it will feature an LGA1718 socket.

This means, much like Intel, AMD will be changing the socket type from PGA to LGA (land grid array), so there will be no pins on the next-gen AMD processors; however, pins will be located on the motherboard socket itself.

Although AM5 will support dual-channel DDR5 memory, no PCI Express Gen5 support is quite strange as Intel will give that on its Alder Lake platform while AMD’s Zen4 Genoa (EPYC) processors will have the feature. Also, it is confirmed that next-gen Zen 4 or Raphael CPUs will be retaining the same 40×40 mm die size.

As we saw the AMD’s complete roadmap, Raphael will be the first to come on the AM5 platform, feature integrated RDNA 2 graphics and supported DDR5 memory. However, it is to be seen if the rumour of not supporting PCIe Gen5 on the AM5 platform turns out to be true or not and when AMD brings it to existence.