AMD’s Ryzen 7000 CPUs will break the 5GHz barrier — and require a new motherboard

theverge.com:

This fall, AMD is planning a clean break with the past, and it thinks your need for speed might convince you to do the same. Today at Computex 2022, the company revealed the key facets of its next-generation Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs, their Zen 4 architecture, and — for the first time in five years — a brand-new kind of motherboard you’ll need to buy. While even some of the company’s oldest AM4 motherboards can be updated to support its latest Ryzen 5000-series desktop CPUs, the upcoming Ryzen 7000 requires AM5.

As the company told us in January, the Ryzen 7000 are the first PC chips based on a 5nm process, and the AM5 motherboard platform is designed to support DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 out of the box.

But there’s a fifth “five” in the mix: AMD says Ryzen 7000 chips will be able to boost north of 5GHz, the first desktop chips from the company to do so. AMD showed off a 5.5GHz clockspeed during its Computex presentation while playing Ghostwire: Tokyo, matching the 5.5GHz turbo of Intel’s Core i9-12900KS. Not that megahertz mean much for performance in isolation — both Intel and AMD have many laptop chips that can turbo to 5GHz too, and that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re faster at tasks than a lower-clocked desktop CPU.

What should actually make a difference: between increased clockspeed and generation-on-generation process improvements, Zen 4 will also have “greater than 15 percent” faster single-threaded performance than Zen 3 (single-thread still being the most important metric for many apps, particularly games). The new chips might also have higher power consumption, though: the new AM5 motherboards can now give the chips up to 170W of power, up from a reported 142W previously.

Under the unusual rook-shaped lid of a Ryzen