AMD Shares Ryzen 8000 Roadmap Confirming Next-Gen CPUs Will Pair Zen 5 With Navi 3.5
At a glance, it probably seems innocuous. A lot of the information on here are things we already knew, like that Socket AM4 is done, Socket AM5 is the new hotness, and AMD will continue to offer CPUs in the 65W to 170W power range on its current desktop platform. However, there are some key details here that are the first time AMD's actually confirmed them.
Two of them are in the headline, and certainly the biggest news: AMD will launch CPUs for Socket AM5 next year that sport the brand-new Zen 5 CPU architecture and "Navi 3.5" graphics. What exactly is Navi 3.5? Well, that's a good question. While the house that Zen built has talked a little bit about Zen 5, we've never heard a whisper of a "Navi 3.5" before.
It's not really a sensible nomenclature, anyway. "Navi" is a codename that refers to the actual GPU silicon, and it typically isn't used for integrated GPUs. Instead, we would refer to them by their architecture, like RDNA 2. We can assume that the "Navi 3.0" under AMD's Ryzen 7000 Series refers to RDNA 3, and the combination of Zen 4 and RDNA 3 does exist in the form of AMD's Phoenix laptop processors, but we haven't heard of any products with that pairing come to the Socket AM5 desktop platform.
Working from that assumption, then, "Navi 3.5" would almost certainly refer to "RDNA 3.5" or a revised version of the RDNA 3 architecture. As someone who follows rumors very closely, and is an admitted rumormonger himself, your author can't help but let his mind run free with the implications of "RDNA 3.5." You see, it has been widely rumored since the release of the Radeon RX 7000 series that those GPUs have major flaws at both the design and implementation levels.
Of course, this could all be entirely off the mark. It's possible that "Navi 3.5" is simply a placeholder to mean that the next-generation Ryzen CPUs will have the latest revision of RDNA 3 graphics. Alternatively, whoever made this slide at AMD (PDF) could simply have the story all wrong.
Whatever the case, it's clear that AMD intends to launch Socket AM5 CPUs with both of its bleeding-edge architectures next year. The other neat detail in the slide is AMD confirming that Socket AM5 will stick around into 2026. Most information from the company had previously only promised that AM5 would last until 2025, so it's nice to see that the new platform will offer strong longevity.
