Can they double the memory lanes without switching socket ? If not I feel like PC is going to fall behind even further compared to Apple chips. Having ram on chip sucks for repairability but 500gb/s main ram bandwidth is insane.

They stumbled into the right direction with strix halo but I have a feeling they won't recognize the win/follow up.

So Zen 6/7 will have a core design and a CCD design. But like past gens, these will be packaged into different products with different sockets and packages (everything from monolithic APUs to sprawling multi-chiplet Server cpus).

So to say that Zen 6/7 supports AM5 on desktop, doesn't necessarily exclude that Zen 6/7 product family in general doesn't support other new/interesting sockets on desktop (or mobile) also. Maybe products for AM6 and AM5 from the same zen family.

Medusa Halo and the Zen7 based 'Grimlock Halo' version might be the interesting ones to watch (if you like efficient Apple-stlyle big APUs with all the memory bandwidth)

I would figure the opposite. There are plenty of people like me staying on AM4 because of the RAM price increases. I will probably skip AM5 entirely.

> less demand from new system builders mean depressed prices

Only if they overestimate demand and overproduce CPUs. Otherwise it will lead to higher prices because there's less economy of scale.

Holy ram prices man!

I just checked how much the 64 Gb ddr4 in my desktop would cost now... it starts at 2.5 times what i paid in 2022.

Sorry AMD, I would maybe like a new desktop but not now.

100% this

The PCI-Express bus is actually rather slow. Only ~63 GB/s, even with PCIe 5 x16!

PCIe is simply not a bottleneck for gaming. All the textures and models are loaded into the GPU once, when the game loads, then re-used from VRAM for every frame. Otherwise, a scene with a lowly 2 GB of assets would cap out at only ~30 fps.

Which is funny to think about historically. I remember when AGP first came out, and it was advertised as making it so GPUs wouldn't need tons of memory, only enough for the frame buffers, and that they would stream texture data across AGP. Well, the demands for bandwidth couldn't keep up. And now, even if the port itself was fast enough, the system RAM wouldn't be. DDR5-6400 running in dual-channel mode is only ~102 GB/s. On the flip side the RTX 5050, a current-gen budget card, has over 3x that at 320 GB/s, and on the top end, the RTX 5090 is 1.8 TB/s.

Main problem seems to be they're kinda badly utilized (IMHO) on many motherboards. Most seem to go with two x16 slots so you get x8 lanes in both.

There are some exceptions, but I haven't seen one with for example four x16 slots that support PCIe 5.0 x4 lanes with bifurcation.

The biggest difference for me for PCIe 5.0 has been additional bandwidth for my M2 drive.

Your comment is basically the "tl;dr" of this Techpowerup article (which is great and people should read it if they are unconvinced or curious): https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-5090-p...

And even when AMD does move their mainstream desktop processors to a new socket, there's very little reason to expect them to be trying to accommodate multi-GPU setups. SLI and Crossfire are dead, multi-GPU gaming isn't coming back for the foreseeable future, so multi-GPU is more or less a purely workstation/server feature at this point. They're not going to increase the cost of their mainstream platform for the sole purpose of cannibalizing Threadripper sales.

Similarly:

Leaks = the author just made something up, but now it ranks extra highly when someone searches for "[upcoming thing] leaks"