News AMD's AM5 Platform Launches With Only DDR5 Support for Ryzen 7000, Dual-Chipset Design

[Admin]

Our sources have confirmed that AMD's AM5 platform for the 5nm Ryzen 7000 'Raphael' CPUs will only support DDR5 at launch.

AMD's AM5 Platform Launches With Only DDR5 Support for Ryzen 7000, Dual-Chipset Design : Read more

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

And this is the same debate we had 6 years ago with DDR3 vs DDR4. Servers benefit greatly, desktops don't.

And it's the same argument we had when Socket AM4 debuted, which was generally limited to specific, often more expensive RAM modules.

And this is specifically the reason I have zero interest in Socket AM5.

 

[saltweaver]

This will be quite expensive at launch. I don't believe DDR5 prices shall drop quickly till the year's end.

 

[ottonis]

In the past, AMD used to bundle their Zen CPUs with quite decent coolers.
So, this time, one option might be to offer some bundles of certain CPU/APUs with a pair of DDR5 RAM-sticks.
If priced attractively, AMD might partially make up for the high DDR5 prices and for limited availability and pull in those potential customers for whom DDR5 prices would be prohibitively high.

 

[wifiburger]

DDR5 4800 speed is worthless, only leaves the 6400 kits which are crap for price

I don't believe AMD saying they extracted extra performance where Intel couldn't.

If you look at Intel 12th gen, the entry level z boards are complete garbage due to Intel charging a premium for the chipset.

So this new x chipset from AMD will have two premium chipset.... expect entry level board to be even more crap due x2 the cost for chipset.

it 100% doesn't look good for value,

 

[Makaveli]

This is nothing new you pay the early adopter tax for new tech. And its why I won't be looking at anything AM5 until 2023.

 

[Krotow]

AM5 cusomers now certainly are early adopters and some bussiness server maintainers. For general public as always - when price will drop. So no earlier than at 2024-25. Those who bought upper end AM4 systems now and aren't eager to upgrade no next novelty, can chill maybe even till AM6. For me it mean next upgrade at like 2028.

 

[InvalidError]

DDR5 4800 speed is worthless, only leaves the 6400 kits which are crap for price

DDR5-4800 only sucks because of those -36-36 or worse latencies on first-gen DRAM chips largely caused by the nominal DRAM voltages being down 200+mV vs what DDR4 XMP profiles typically call on to get there. In a generation or two of DDR5 manufacturing refinements, we'll likely see much cheaper DDR4-4800-30 or tighter and those will compare far more favorably against today's cheap-and-cheerful DDR4-3200-16/3600-18.

The first two years into a new memory standard ramping up volume production have always been hit-and-miss, so I'm not expecting the DDR5 pricing and performance situation to sort itself out until end of 2023. Ryzen 7000 platforms may be a tough pill to swallow for budget shoppers for most of their first year.

 

[saltweaver]

I can see price drop by 20% only if all manufacturers prepare full stock by the end of the year.

 

[hannibal]

No problem. AMD will continue to sell Zen3 cpus for ddr4 modules. Those who are willing to pay premium for GPU and CPU are not afraid of DDR5 pricing!
But lets first see how pricing in general develop in this year...

 

[SSGBryan]

This is why I was never interesting in bleeding edge tech. I'll be upgrading my Zen+ with a Zen 3 CPU and will soldier on until at least the 2nd generation of AM5.

 

[vMax]

I think it would be a mistake not providing DDR4 options to AM5. I moved to Alder Lake and got a Z690 D4 Strix motherboard so that I could reuse my 32GB DDR4 3600 RAM which was a huge cost saver over adding DDR5 and even now DDR5 has not reached anywhere near it's potential and for any decent DDR5 set, it costs way too much, especially for your average gamer/semi pro use.

A lot of AMD users will be upgrading and could well have done with reusing there DDR4 ram as a major cost saver especially those optimised kits. Hope they change there minds or have some slighter lower end AM5 motherboard in the wings for DDR4.

 

[hotaru251]

well they just shafted a lot of sales early on.

adopting a new MB, cpu, & DDR5 prices at once limits the userbase.

Zen scales hard with ram speed.

"budget" ddr5 is slow as frick.


I shall just build another am4 system and after yr or 2 go am5 when prices drop for everything.

 

[mrv_co]

I'm more than happy to let AM5 / DDR5 mature while the early-adopters smoke out the bugs.

 

[Unolocogringo]

I just upgraded from a 3600 to a 5600x system.
Was holding out for Zed 3d. When it became 5800x only and AM5 the next processor socket for newer CPUs it was a no brainer when prices dropped.
Will hold me over until DDR5 Windows 11, and Intel figures out how to drop high wattage performance with their process node.

 

[Deleted member 431422]

I'm looking forward to the B600 chipset motherboards. I'd buy Ryzen 7 5700G, but since AM5 is coming this year I'll wait and see what APU's AMD will offer.

 

[-Fran-]

This is an interesting paradox... So, from what I'm reading here, people seems to be of the generalized opinion to "wait". So that means DDR5 modules will continue to be injected into the market, but there's going to be a point where retailers just won't buy them anymore (over-stock and stuff) to sell current ones. General public will definitely won't know the difference between DDR4 and 5, so they'll only notice how much more expensive DDR5 is and see if they can get a DDR4 platform, or it'll come down to OEM's to price stuff competitively. Then again, major OEMs don't care about AMD anyway.

I'm thinking that AMD will have to time this one very well and/or push Samsung or Micron to get better modules out there for AMD to justify the gains. Which also brings me to think about that: "gains". At what point do we (yes, me included) stop whining about the price and look at the actual performance benefit? I personally do not think DDR4 is currently holding back Alder Lake horribly, but if you look at the hard data for similarly timed RAM (DDR4-3200 CL16 vs DDR5-6400 CL30) it is undeniable that Alder Lake gets a massive boost in performance in most things, games included. Then you have AMD's 3D-V cache which should massively help to hide the horrible latencies from DDR5's lower end kits (or so I predict?). Maybe worth investigating with the 5800X3D? Although, when the IF is clocked higher, it does give the whole CPU a massive boost, so that brings me to another angle: as long as you can decouple the IF (FCLK) from the RAM clock, then AM5 may be able to get away with very good performance using crappy kits?

Hm... A lot to think about and speculate, but interesting to check now that there's a "sample" of what AM5 could become thanks to the 5800X3D.

Regards.

 

[hotaru.hino]

I find it amusing the tables have turned in this regard. Intel's offering a DDR4 upgrade path to LGA 1700 now and AMD isn't with AM5. And when DDR3 was becoming a thing, AMD boasted you could have a DDR2 upgrade path to their new parts.

 

[escksu]

This is an interesting paradox... So, from what I'm reading here, people seems to be of the generalized opinion to "wait". So that means DDR5 modules will continue to be injected into the market, but there's going to be a point where retailers just won't buy them anymore (over-stock and stuff) to sell current ones. General public will definitely won't know the difference between DDR4 and 5, so they'll only notice how much more expensive DDR5 is and see if they can get a DDR4 platform, or it'll come down to OEM's to price stuff competitively. Then again, major OEMs don't care about AMD anyway.

I'm thinking that AMD will have to time this one very well and/or push Samsung or Micron to get better modules out there for AMD to justify the gains. Which also brings me to think about that: "gains". At what point do we (yes, me included) stop whining about the price and look at the actual performance benefit? I personally do not think DDR4 is currently holding back Alder Lake horribly, but if you look at the hard data for similarly timed RAM (DDR4-3200 CL16 vs DDR5-6400 CL30) it is undeniable that Alder Lake gets a massive boost in performance in most things, games included. Then you have AMD's 3D-V cache which should massively help to hide the horrible latencies from DDR5's lower end kits (or so I predict?). Maybe worth investigating with the 5800X3D? Although, when the IF is clocked higher, it does give the whole CPU a massive boost, so that brings me to another angle: as long as you can decouple the IF (FCLK) from the RAM clock, then AM5 may be able to get away with very good performance using crappy kits?

Hm... A lot to think about and speculate, but interesting to check now that there's a "sample" of what AM5 could become thanks to the 5800X3D.

Regards.

AMD's vcache could well reduce effects of ddr5's higher latencies. However, this also means it will benefit less from faster ddr5 as well.

 

[Alpha_Lyrae]

I don't think having DDR4 support is a great idea to begin with, simply because you need two different motherboards with the same chipset (X670 DDR4 w/ DRAM PMICs on board or X670 DDR5 without DRAM PMICs or offer DDR4 only on mainstream B/A boards). It's an either/or deal and causes an excess of product that motherboard manufacturers are burdened with.

There's also the case of not moving forward. iGPUs need DDR5 as they've always been limited by memory bandwidth. RDNA2 iGPUs would not be feasible on DDR4. These are primarily used in mainstream boards, so DDR4-only mainstream wouldn't work either.

As DDR5 takes over, the inverse will be true, and DDR4 will end up more expensive as stocks dwindle and manufacturers divert fabs solely to DDR5 dies and modules.

 

[DavidC1]

There's also the case of not moving forward. iGPUs need DDR5 as they've always been limited by memory bandwidth. RDNA2 iGPUs would not be feasible on DDR4. These are primarily used in mainstream boards, so DDR4-only mainstream wouldn't work either.

You have a point but lots of people will simply not buy DDR5 based platforms because of the price and it simply doesn't make sense for the value market.

Getting an iGPU but having to buy an expensive DDR5 memory is a contradiction. The performance levels are still very low anyways.

DDR5-4800 only sucks because of those -36-36 or worse latencies on first-gen DRAM chips largely caused by the nominal DRAM voltages being down

This was always the case since when DDR debuted back with the Athlon. You needed DDR2-533 to equal/beat DDR-400. And DDR3-1066 to beat DDR2-800, and DDR4-2133 to beat DDR3-1600.

They tell you these complex sounding technical terms and say it makes it perform better clock, etc, but it never did because it's very likely they need all that to maintain performance. Same with DDR5 having "virtual channels".

Maybe in some corner case scenarios for servers but never have seen that for client.

That said DDR5 can reach much higher transfer rates and will pull away from DDR4.

 

[Sleepy_Hollowed]

Not a big deal unless they stop making AM4 CPUs.

It does put them in a bit of a pickle with budget performance, but it certainly saves them engineering support.

DDR5 price is the least of the cost consideration when buying a new system, considering the pricing of new motherboards, PSUs and coolers.

 

[Xajel]

a single chipset chip that connects to the Ryzen 7000 CPU via a PCIe 4.0 x4 connection
...
Meanwhile, the enthusiast X670 platform employs two of these chips

I don't know, but the rumors say that AM5 CPUs will bring an increase to PCIe lanes as well (extra 4 lanes, a total of 28 lanes - 16 for GPU, 4x for NVMe, 4x for chipset + x4 new lanes). Is it possible that the X670 platform will connect each chipset chiplet through a dedicated x4 lanes? or the primary chiplet will just share the bandwidth with the secondary chiplet? It could be PCIe 5.0 x4 (unlikely due to long traces and costs).

What do you guys prefer? giving the second chiplet dedicated lanes or using these lanes for NVMe directly? like two directly connected NVMe drives and the chipset can still have full x4 lanes (PCIe 4.0 or 5.0). OR it might be optional for the mobo maker to decide.

 

[bmtphoenix]

Our sources have confirmed that AMD's AM5 platform for the 5nm Ryzen 7000 'Raphael' CPUs will only support DDR5 at launch.

AMD's AM5 Platform Launches With Only DDR5 Support for Ryzen 7000, Dual-Chipset Design : Read more

Okay. So it's going to be exactly the same as any other time that a new memory standard started getting support.

Looking at the prices listed, it looks like DDR5 might be one of the least expensive switch to a new standard. IIRC DDR4 - a few years in - was around these prices.

 

[jacob249358]

shoulda done it like alder lake. Silly