As part of its quarterly earnings call this week, AMD reiterated that Zen 5 architecture processors for client and data center applications will be available this year. While the company didn’t make any new disclosures about the product or provide a timeline beyond “later this year,” AMD’s latest statement reiterates AMD’s plans and confirms that they remain on track.
So far, we’ve heard about three Zen 5-based products from AMD: the Strix Point accelerated processing unit (APU) for laptops (and perhaps eventually desktops too), and the Granite for enthusiast desktops Ridge processors and Turin CPUs for data centers. In a conference call with analysts and investors, AMD’s Lisa Su confirmed plans to launch Turin and Strix this year.
“Looking ahead, customers are very excited about our upcoming Turin family of EPYC processors,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said on the company’s earnings call this week (via SeekingAlpha). “Turin is the fourth generation of the existing EPYC platform. “A drop-in replacement that extends our performance, efficiency and TCO leadership by adding next-generation Zen 5 cores, new memory expansion capabilities and higher core counts.”
The head of AMD also confirmed that Turin will be directly compatible with the existing SP5 platform (i.e. in the LGA 6096 package), with more than 96 cores, and more memory expansion capabilities (i.e. enhanced support for CXL, and perhaps support for innovative DIMM). At the same time, the new CPU will also provide higher per-core performance and higher performance efficiency.
AMD high-performance CPU core roadmap.Excerpt from AMD Financial Analyst Day 2022
In the case of Strix Point, 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-generation Zen 5 cores with enhanced RDNA graphics and the updated Ryzen AI Engine to significantly improve PC performance, energy efficiency and AI capabilities,” said Su. “Strix has strong customer momentum, with the first batch of The laptop is expected to launch later this year.”
It’s worth noting that AMD chiefs didn’t mention Granite Ridge CPUs for enthusiast desktops during the conference call. Although desktop CPUs tend to be less profitable than mobile or server parts, they tend to be the AMD products of least interest to investors. Despite this omission, AMD has always launched consumer desktop chips ahead of server chips, in part because the latter require longer validation times, so confirming a 2024 Turin launch is still a positive sign for Granite Ridge .