As part of their quarterly earnings call this week, AMD re-emphasized that its Zen 5-architecture processors for both client and datacenter applications will be available this year. While the company is not making any new disclosured on products or providing a timeline beyond “later this year”, the latest statement from AMD serves as a reiteration of AMD’s plans, and confirmation that those plans are still on schedule.
So far, we have heard about three Zen 5-based products from AMD: the Strix Point accelerated processing units (APUs) for laptops (and perhaps eventually desktops), the Granite Ridge processors for enthusiast-grade desktops, and Turin CPUs for datacenters. During the conference call with analysts and investors, AMD’s Lisa Su confirmed plans to launch Turin and Strix this year.
“Looking ahead, customer excitement for our upcoming Turin family of EPYC processors is very strong,” said Lisa Su, chief executive officer of AMD, at the company’s earnings call this week (via SeekingAlpha). “Turin is a drop-in replacement for existing 4th Generation EPYC platforms that extends our performance, efficiency and TCO leadership with the addition of our next-gen Zen 5 core, new memory expansion capabilities, and higher core counts.”
The head of AMD also confirmed that Turin will be drop-in compatible with existing SP5 platforms (i.e., will come in an LGA 6096 package), feature more than 96 cores, and more memory expansion capabilities (i.e., enhanced support for CXL and perhaps support for innovative DIMMs). Meanwhile, the new CPUs will also offer higher per-core performance and higher performance efficiency.
AMD High Performance CPU Core Roadmap. From AMD Financial Analyst Day 2022
As far as Strix Point is concerned, Lisa Su confirmed that this is a Zen 5 part featuring an ‘enhanced RDNA 3’ graphics core (also known as Navi 3.5), and an updated neural processing unit.
“Strix combines our next-gen Zen 5 core with enhanced RDNA graphics and an updated Ryzen AI engine to significantly increase the performance, energy efficiency, and AI capabilities of PCs,” Su said. “Customer momentum for Strix is strong with the first notebooks on track to launch later this year.”
It’s notable that the head of AMD did not mention Granite Ridge CPUs foe enthusiast-grade desktops during the conference call. Though as desktop CPUs tend to have smaller margins than mobile or server parts, they are often AMD’s least interesting products to investors. Despite that omission, AMD has always launched their consumer desktop chips ahead of their server chips – in part due to the longer validation times required on the latter – so Turin being confirmed for 2024 is still a positive sign for Granite Ridge.