AMD Zen 4 may be a long way off but possible specs are coming thick and fast
Serial leaker, ExecutableFix, has taken to the Twittersphere again with a sneak peek at what AMD has lined up its Zen 4 consumer chips. Along with a couple of details about what AMD's 'Raphael' chip is, he also includes a shot of what it may look like—like Intel before it, AMD is moving over to a land grid array (LGA) as opposed to the pin grid array (PGA) used on its AM4 platform.
Let's keep it going! Raphael is the first Zen 4 consumer chip and here's a first lookRaphael - AM5 socket - DDR5 (no DDR4) - 28 PCIe 4.0 lanes (+4 compared to Zen 3) - 120W TDP (170W possible as well ????) pic.twitter.com/5DcTmjdqNdMay 25, 2021
This is obviously not a photograph of AMD's next major chip, but something that ExecutableFix has cooked up to show what we're going to be getting when Zen 4 does drop.
If you've ever flipped over an Intel chip, then this is a design that should be familiar to you. AMD has used LGA designs with its Threadripper and EPYC chips previously, so we have a decent idea of how it will work.
There are a fair few more pinouts than the AM4 socket, too. AM4 has 1,331, while AM5 could come with as many as 1,718.
The few specs that are presented along with the image are intriguing too. The idea that Raphael will exclusively offer support for DDR5 seems like a bit of a stretch, simply because pricing may be prohibitive for the new memory standard for a good while—for comparison, Intel's Alder Lake is expected to support both memory standards for that very reason.
Zen 4 isn't due until the fall of 2022, and a lot can happen between now and then.