What AMD's Latest Linux Patches Reveal About Upcoming Zen 5 CPUs

If you read that headline and thought, "what the heck, Zen 4 just came out," I have bad news for you, friend. The Ryzen 7000 series processors for desktop and their Socket AM5 platform came out last September—over nine months ago. It'll still be a long while yet before we see the release of any Zen 5 processors, but it's well past time for us to start looking ahead toward those chips.

Indeed, the "father of Zen" himself, Jim Keller, seems to think that Zen 5 will gain a big jump in performance compared to Zen 4. Along similar lines, those parts are expected to ship with some cores marked for "low-power" operation—although unlike Intel's CPUs, they'll still share the same architecture. This new information lends credence to the leak we saw back at the beginning of June, where a "Family 26, Model 64" processor found its way into the Einstein@Home database.


That information comes from within the EDAC driver, which also reveals that next-gen EPYC server CPUs are likely to top out at twelve-channel memory just like the current-generation parts. No word on whether that'll be the currently-available DDR5 memory or whether those parts will ship with support for next-gen DDR6, but our money's on DDR5 still.

These are just the first steps toward enabling the use of Linux on Zen 5 processors, but as Linux journalist laureate Michael Larabel writes over at his site Phoronix, AMD was once known for poor Linux support, with basic software enablement like this coming late, even post-launch for older hardware. Linux is the operating system of choice in the world of high-performance computing, though; if the company wants to compete in that market, it has to have good Linux support.