AMD expects to use AM5 platform just like AM4 for a long time
AMD’s president Lisa Su says customers can expect the AM5 socket, like the AM4 platform, to be used for a long time. The president says that using sockets for a long time is good for customers and has been good for the company itself.
Su doesn’t yet know how long the socket will actually be in use, but says customers can expect it to be a long-lived platform. She makes the statements in an interview with multiple media that PC World published and has been taken offline at the time of writing. She also says she expects AM4 products to be sold for ‘a few more years’. However, the switch to AM5 is necessary ‘because of the new I/O’.
AMD announced in October that it would introduce a new socket that will support DDR5 and PCIe 5.0. In doing so, the company also said the new socket would support AM4 coolers. On Tuesday, the company revealed that the Ryzen 7000 CPUs are the first processors to use the AM5 socket.
The new platform uses the LGA1718 socket, with the pins on the motherboard just like Intel CPUs. With AM4 AMD still used a pin grid array socket, where the pins are on the processor itself. With such a PGA socket, the risk of damaging the pins is greater, although, according to AMD, this is not the primary reason for switching to LGA. The company would need more contact points on its platforms, for which an LGA socket is better suited.
AMD’s AM4 socket has been around since 2016. The sockets from competitor Intel normally last two generations. For example, the current socket 1700 was introduced with Alder Lake and is expected to be supported by the next CPU generation, Raptor Lake.
In the conversation, AMD also discusses the use of DDR5 by the new platform. This memory is now hardly available. One of the questions was therefore whether AMD has taken this into account and whether the AM5 platform supports DDR4. AMD’s Vice President of Product Management, David McAfee, does not answer the latter. He does say that AMD has been working with partner companies to ensure that enough DDR5 memory can be delivered when the AM5 CPUs go on sale in the second half of the year.
When it comes to overall chip shortages and inventory issues, Su expects this to still be a problem at least into the first half of 2022. She does say that it has improved in recent months and that AMD is delivering more and more. Su also says he has heard complaints from customers that AMD has supplied less cheap processors in recent years and that this is something the company is ‘thinking about’. It therefore seems that AMD is also considering launching cheaper products.