A Socket SP5 (LGA6096) motherboard for AMD’s forthcoming EPYC Genoa CPUs has been teased by a ServeTheHome forum user(opens in new tab). The image appears to show that Genoa will ship with 12-channel DDR5 compatibility, allowing for up to 12TB of high-speed memory to be installed on a single motherboard.
To house the colossal Socket SP5, the unknown motherboard has an E-ATX design factor. It looks to be an engineering sample of a dual-socket platform, which means it contains two Socket SP5 and 24 DDR5 memory slots rather than the 12 DDR5 memory slots seen on a standard motherboard.
The Socket SP5 appears to have 6,096 contacts. With only 4,094 contacts in the Socket SP3, which houses AMD’s EPYC Naples, Rome, and Milan CPUs, the Socket SP5 offers a 49 percent increase in contacts. Genoa’s improved features, such as 96 Zen 4 cores, DDR5 support, and PCIe 5.0 support, are due to the significant increase in socket size. Furthermore, Socket SP5 will continue to support Bergamo, Genoa’s successor, which will increase the core count to 128.
AMD confirmed that EPYC Genoa would support DDR5, but didn’t go into detail. An AMD driver and a Gigabyte hack, on the other hand, backed up the claim that Genoa would support 12 memory channels. Furthermore, the most recent photos adds to the credibility of the initial story.
AMD EPYC Genoa brings 12TB memory capacity support
Up to eight memory channels have always been supported by AMD’s EPYC processors. With the current density of DDR4, the maximum capacity per chip was 4TB. That’s a lot already, but EPYC Genoa will enable up to 12TB. Ordinary DDR5 DIMMs, on the other hand, will not get you there. Instead, we’ll look at 3DS DIMMs, which are three-dimensionally stacked DIMMs that use TSVs technology.
EPYC Genoa will not only have more memory capacity, but the 5 nm data center processors will also benefit from DDR5’s advantages. DDR4-3200 is supported by AMD’s current EPYC Milan processors out of the box. If the rumors are true, Genoa will support DDR5-5200 memory. The data rate, however, is highly dependent on the type of DIMMs used, memory ranks, and the number of memory slots occupied. We expect the supported data rate to dip between DDR5-3600 and DDR5-4000 if the storage capacity is maxed out at 12TB, similar to how DDR5 works on Intel’s consumer Alder Lake CPUs.
AMD acknowledged in its Genoa presentation that it had already sampled 5nm CPUs for a number of clients, which would explain how the image of the Socket SP5 motherboard got out. Despite AMD’s lack of a firm launch date, Genoa should be available before the end of the year.
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