We've now seen five of the upcoming flagship X670E motherboards, with offerings from MSI, ASRock, ASUS, Gigabyte, and Biostar.

AMD hasn't clarified its dual-chipset alignment yet, but recently leaked pictures of the MSI X670E motherboards and ASUS Prime X670-P Wi-Fi motherboards have confirmed many of the details we previously uncovered. According to our sources, AMD's mainstream B650 platform will come with a single chipset chip that connects to the Ryzen 7000 CPU via a PCIe 4.0 x4 connection. However, documents we've seen say that a PCIe 5.0 connection is available on some AM5 processors.

Meanwhile, the enthusiast X670 platform employs two of these ASMedia chips (our sources confirm the chips are identical, not a north/southbridge-type arrangement), effectively doubling these connectivity options. Furthermore, these chipsets are daisy-chained together. This stands in contrast to AMD's approach with the current 500-series motherboards, which use different chips for the X- and B-series motherboards. The new approach will obviously provide cost and design flexibility advantages.

https://twitter.com/9550pro/status/1...-we-know-specs

Another report about the 600-series chipset (codenamed Promontory 21 - PROM21) has backed up our findings and provided more insights into the power- and cost-saving features of the 600-series chipset design. The chipset is estimated at 40mm^2 (19x19mm). If you expand the tweet above, you can see another interesting caveat of AMD's new chiplet-based chipset approach — motherboard vendors can place the chipsets in varying orientations. We've also seen another implementation with what appears to be a PCIe switch placed in between two chipsets, possibly for fanout connections, so there is a possibility that we'll see a number of different techniques.

Finally, AMD has confirmed that the AM5 socket will only support DDR5 memory. The company says that DDR5 provides the extra performance to justify the cost, but we'll have to watch pricing closely. As we've reported, DDR5 continues to be more expensive than DDR4, largely because DDR5 marks the first generation of mainstream memory with onboard power management ICs (PMICs) and VRMs. Unfortunately, those have been in constant shortage due to the pandemic, but luckily, DDR5 pricing has fallen as PMIC and VRM supply improves. Unfortunately, DDR5 is still more expensive than comparable DDR4 kits.

However, DDR5's more complex power circuitry and design mean that these modules will continue to command a premium over DDR4. DDR5 also has in-built ECC mechanisms for data at rest, which requires additional dies to provide the same memory capacity as DDR4. This means DDR5 will remain more expensive than DDR4, regardless of supply.

We've also seen audio driver code submitted to Linux to enable the audio co-processor (ACP) present in the chips. This patch has come somewhat late, so there may be no out-of-the-box audio support for Ryzen 7000 chips in Linux when the chips initially come to market, though that will soon be rectified.

AMD ZEN 4 RYZEN 7000 PRICING


AMD hasn't shared specifications for the Ryzen 7000 product stack yet, so naturally, we don't know how pricing will land. However, it is noteworthy that TSMC's 5nm process is rumored to be much more expensive than the 7nm process was at this stage of production. The 6nm I/O die is also expected to add cost compared to the 12nm I/O die that AMD used with the Ryzen 5000 series.

The price of the chip you buy isn't always all that matters, though: The X670 and B650 AM5 platforms support only DDR5 memory, which has pricing implications for platforms built around AMD's upcoming Zen 4 processors. Though the pricing differences will become smaller over time, DDR5 will remain more expensive than DDR4, regardless of supply. That means Intel's Raptor Lake will likely have a platform pricing advantage with readily-available DDR4 platforms, which could pay off in the mid-range and low end of the product stack. AMD has a counter with less-expensive PCIe 4.0-only X670 motherboards, but we'll have to see how that pans out when those boards come to market.

All these factors mean you might have to pony up some extra cash compared to competing Intel Raptor Lake platforms, at least with the inaugural Zen 4 'Raphael' Ryzen 7000 chips for Socket AM5. As a result, much like we saw with AMD's high-priced debut for the Ryzen 5000 processors (AMD just finally released lower-cost Zen 3 chips a year and a half later), you can expect to pay a premium for AMD's first Ryzen 7000 platforms when they arrive later this year.

There is an open question, though: Will AMD bring Zen 4 designs to the older AM4 motherboards? We've seen no concrete indications that this will happen in the near future, and it certainly wouldn't make sense until after the full gamut of AM5 Ryzen 7000 chips are released — as a buisness, it would be a poor decision to undercut your premium products before they're even launched. Will AM4 Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 models come later? Time will tell.

We won't have to wait long to see how pricing stacks up — the 5nm Zen 4 Raphael Ryzen 7000 chips and the accompanying 600-series chipsets are due on the market in Fall 2022. We're sure to learn much more as we get closer to launch, so check back for updates, which we'll add to this article regularly.