According to AMD, the upcoming generation of processors, dubbed Ryzen 7000 “Raphael,” is going to allow unprecedented levels of overclocking.
Even though Zen 4 chips will already hit very high boost clocks, the company seems to have big plans for those who might want to push those numbers even higher.
AMD
The teaser comes from the latest AMD Meet The Experts webinar. The key focus seems to have been the introduction of DDR5 DRAM. As of now, AMD still doesn’t support DDR5 memory, but that will be changing later this year both in its next-gen EPYC Genoa CPUs for servers and data centers and in the consumer-level AMD Ryzen 7000.
Although focused on memory, the webinar still revealed a tantalizing bit of information that is sure to be of interest to overclocking enthusiasts. Joseph Tao, memory enabling manager at AMD, mentioned that next-gen Zen 4 CPUs should excel at overclocking in particular.
“Our first DDR5 platform for gaming is our Raphael platform. One of the awesome things about Raphael is that we are really going to try to make a big splash with overclocking, and I’ll just kinda leave it there, but speeds that you maybe thought couldn’t be possible, may be possible with this overclocking spec,” said Tao in the webinar.
That’s an exciting, if not very informative, teaser. Considering that some of the Ryzen 7000 chips are going to hit clock speeds of at (or above) 5.0GHz, the idea of bringing that number even higher is something current-gen processors would struggle to do. However, with the updates brought on by the next generation and the switch to a 5nm process, it’s possible that hitting frequencies over 5GHz is going to be the norm one day soon.
Wccftech
As Wccftech points out, AMD is supposed to add a new Ryzen Accelerated Memory Profile (RAMP) to the upcoming AM5 platform, perhaps alongside an update to the Ryzen Master software. These two things combined with the power provided by next-gen Ryzen 7000 could result in overclocked speeds unlike any we’ve ever seen before. This marks a difference from the upcoming AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which arrives with a hard lock on overclocking — although it has already been surpassed by a clever user.
Aside from overclocking, there was a lot of interesting ground to cover in regards to the EPYC Genoa CPUs, with speakers from both AMD and Samsung. The companies teamed up to bring the platform up to DDR5 memory with DIMM capacities as high as 512GB. As we’ve recently seen in an early teaser, motherboards made for Genoa may support up to 12TB of memory.
Switching to the new AM5 platform for consumer CPUs is going to be a huge move for AMD. Ryzen 7000 processors will open the door to DDR5 memory and PCIe Gen 5.0. However, perhaps the biggest change of all will stem from the performance these chips are rumored to offer. As they are set to launch later this year, we can expect to learn more about their exact specifications in the next couple of months.