AMD’s upcoming AM5 motherboards will arrive in Q2 2022 while the Raptor Lake Z790 series in Q3

While it's still 2021, people are already talking about next-gen processors and the motherboards supporting them. The AMD Zen 4 based Ryzen processors codenamed Raphael rumors and early spec leaks…

By Raunak Saha

June 16, 2021

3 min read

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While it’s still 2021, people are already talking about next-gen processors and the motherboards supporting them. The AMD Zen 4 based Ryzen processors codenamed Raphael rumors and early spec leaks have already spread across the internet and now its time to dig into the upcoming AM5 based motherboards.

Now, the new rumour came from PJ, who is an editor and reviewer at Uniko’s Hardware:

https://twitter.com/PJ_Lab_UH/status/1405050672618250241

So, you see the tweet shows the estimated launch timelines of the various motherboards including the upcoming Intel Z690 platform. Well, Intel did have a hard time with Rocket Lake-S desktop processors, and is set to regain its good name with Alder Lake, so a Q4 launch of the flagship Z690 motherboards in 2021 itself is confirmed.

On the other hand, the budget Intel B660 and H610 motherboards are also confirmed to come sometime in Q1 2021 what’s interesting to see that Intel’s Z790 motherboards for Raptor Lake are roughly scheduled for a launch in Q3 2022. Obviously, Intel will take special attention to AMD’s Raphael and its final launch could be affected by AMD’s launch.

Already we have seen the existence of the upcoming X570S motherboards that could be meant for the Zen 3 refresh CPUs, but AMD’s biggest launch will be next year with the announcement of AM5 based X670? motherboards, the name is not sure yet, but the AM5 platform will surely bring major upgrades with the new Zen 4 architecture.

AMD’s Zen 4 based CPUs will use TSMC’s 5nm process node & the IOD will be based on TSMC’s 6nm process node. Zen 4 is now supposed to give around a 20% IPC increase over last year’s Zen 3, and this kind of jump is expected because of the leap in architecture.

Not only this, the architecture will allow Zen 4 CPUs will feature 8 core chiplets, so expect around 50% performance per watt gains between Zen 3 and Zen 4.

Also, the presence of 28 PCIe Gen 4.0 lanes is now confirmed, and it also signifies, AMD would not shift to a costlier PCIe Gen 5 like Intel is to do with Alder Lake. The CPUs will retain the 105-120W TDPs as we saw with Zen 3, and it is not surprising because AMD would use a more efficient 5nm process from TSMC.

The AM5 platform will support DDR5-5200 RAMs, 28 PCIe Gen 4.0 lanes, more NVMe 4.0 & maybe support for USB 4.0. So, these Ryzen 7000 CPUs based on Zen 4 is real and coming next year; however, Intel’s progress will decide how soon AMD could bring them to the market, but not before 2022.