During an interview with AMD after the Ryzen 7000 Unveil, the company confirmed that its 5nm Zen 4 CPUs won't face any supply constraints. In addition to that, AMD has made a commitment that it will support the AM5 platform through and beyond 2025.
AMD 5nm CPUs Including Ryzen 7000 Will Not Have Any Supply Issues At Launch, Enough CPUs For Everyone!
The first and most important bit that comes directly from AMD's CEO, Lisa Su, is that the 5nm Zen 4 CPUs including the recently unveiled Ryzen 7000 lineup won't be affected by supply issues, reports PCGamer. The red team acknowledged that while previous products on the 7nm process node saw supply constraints at launch, that won't be the case with their 5nm products and as such, the Ryzen 7000 CPU lineup will be available plenty.
"It is true that if you look at the past 18 months there have been a number of things, whether its capacity limitations or logistics," says Dr. Su. "From an AMD standpoint, we have dramatically increased our overall capacity, in terms of wafers, as well as substrates and on the back end. So with our launch of Zen 4 we don't expect any supply constraints.
"Logistically it takes a little bit longer for things to get into region. So we're having this event at the end of August and we're on sale on September 27. One of the reasons for that time, frankly, is to make sure that we do have product in region so that people can really look at buying across the board."
AMD CEO, Dr. Lisa Su
AMD Promises To Support AM5 Platform Through & Beyond 2025
Another major thing confirmed by AMD is the commitment to the new AM5 platform. The AM4 socket has seen over 5 years of support and the red team has promised continued support for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, AMD's CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, plans to offer a similar level of commitment to the AM5 platform that should last through 2025 and beyond.
Through 2025 means that we will definitely see at least four generations of Zen CPUs on the platform including the upcoming Zen 4, Zen 4 V-Cache, Zen 5, and whatever comes after that. All of these are expected between 2022-2025.
"We built the platform around next generation technologies so that you can build today and upgrade as your needs grow over time," explains AMD's David McAfee at today's event. "And, just like AM4, we're making a commitment to support the AM5 platform with new technologies and next generation architectures through at least 2025. We're really excited about the next era of rising desktops with AM5."
"We do expect AM4 and AM5 to coexist for quite some time," Lisa Su tells us. "You should expect that, like with AM4, we'll build out the entire AM5 stack, but it will it will take some time to build out and we want to make sure the cost points are right, as always."
AMD CEO, Dr. Lisa Su
AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs Feature 2 RDNA 2 Compute Units With 2.2 GHz Clock Speeds
The last part of this story is something that AMD's Robert Hallock had already confirmed a while back but it looks like we now know the exact specifications of the integrated GPU featured on the Ryzen 7000 Desktop CPUs. As expected, the Zen 4 CPUs will feature an RDNA 2 GPU core featured within the IOD and fabricated on a 6nm process node.
This low-power and low-core count design are to make troubleshooting easier with access to a display output without requiring a discrete GPU. In addition to that, AMD stated that there's a large market for iGPUs in the office & business segments where consumers don't require higher-end GPUs.
We still think of the Ryzen 7000 series as a CPU. The graphics cores in that IO die are not many, the purpose of adding graphics is three-fold. One, it greatly expands these products in the commercial market where they don't buy discrete at all, they just want to turn it on, have video encode/decode and light up some displays for office work and that's what the GPU in the IO die will offer so that's a huge business opportunity for us on the Ryzen PRO side as we start migrating these components over to that business.
The second is for diagnostic purposes, how do you know that you have a bad graphics card? Well, you have to swap in another graphics card but with the graphics core we have, you can do a little bit of troubleshooting thirdly, we were thinking about users who are planning to buy a discrete graphics, and it's still in transit in the mail but all the other hardware has arrived first so it's all sat there, looking at a pile of components and don't have a GPU to actually set that all up. That would go away with the Ryzen 7000 series.
We are still going to do APUs with big graphics so APUs 'BIG GRAPHICS', CPUs 'little graphics'. That would be our strategy going forward.
Robert Hallock (AMD Director of Technical Marketing)
We are developing a lot of technologies that make use of integrated graphics in many ways and there are things that we are able to do with technologies such as Smart Shift ECO where we can turn off the discrete graphics and we can run the notebook off of the iGPU and say you want that because you want less heat, longer battery life (even when you are playing a game) or you want less fan noise or lower power consumption, there's all these benefits to it. Because we have that thin integrated graphics in Ryzen 7000 series, it's going to allow us to bring more of these types of smart technologies over to the desktops aswell so those customers can get some of these benefits.
Frank Azor (Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions)
So coming to the specifications, the iGPU on the AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs will feature 2 Compute Units for a total of 128 stream processors. These cores will run at a base clock speed of 400 MHz and a graphics frequency of 2200 MHz which could be the peak frequency. Offering up to 0.563 TFLOPs of 563 GFLOPs of compute power, this will deliver slightly better performance than the Nintendo Switch which is rated at 500 TFLOPs. You can definitely enjoy some old-school or less graphics-intensive gaming with the iGPU but the CPUs are mainly designed to be used primarily with discrete graphics cards.
The AMD Ryzen 7000 Desktop CPUs and the AM5 platform will be making an official retail debut on 27th of September so stay tuned for more information.
