AMD’s next-gen Zen 5 processors have already been spotted, or at least we’ve a sighting of the ground being prepared for them, even though new Ryzen 7000 CPUs have only been on sale for a week.
VideoCardz (opens in new tab) reports that what should be the Ryzen 8000 range has had support added in HWiNFO (a hardware diagnostic and monitoring tool for PCs), specifically in the ‘upcoming changes’ log for the new version of the utility.
HWiNFO states: “Added early support of some AMD Zen 5 families.”
As VideoCardz points out, this essentially means that the devs of this software are now aware of some of the first IDs for Zen 5 CPUs, or at least a few of them, and that’s a tasty hint that development is progressing nicely at AMD with the next-gen silicon.
Analysis: Get ready for Zen 5 versus… Meteor or Arrow Lake?
We may start seeing Zen 5 chips turn up in very early samples perhaps a bit sooner than we thought, although that still won’t be for a good while.
Remember, Zen 5 isn’t due until 2024, so that’s a long way off yet. A couple of months back, we did hear AMD confirm that these next-gen processors are on schedule for being released the year after next, so again, that’s a good sign development is proceeding nicely with Ryzen 8000.
We don’t know much about Zen 5 at this point, except that AMD has promised it’ll include AI-related optimizations, though exactly what that means, Team Red didn’t make clear. While AMD has notably steered clear of using AI with its upscaling tech for Radeon GPUs (FSR), the rumor mill contends that this stance may change in the future, and the company could be set to embrace machine learning in a much bigger way down the line with both GPUs and CPUs, perhaps. We shall see.
Another interesting point here is that Intel’s Meteor Lake, which is the generation to follow the imminent next-gen Raptor Lake, is also in the release notes for this version of HWiNFO, which brings ‘enhanced support’ for these chips which are expected to debut in 2023.
Again, this is a handy hint that things are going well with the Intel silicon that will likely battle Zen 5. (Unless Zen 5 comes out later in 2024, and Intel has managed to pump out its following generation, which will be Arrow Lake – and the latter could be another big step forward for Team Blue, just as Meteor Lake is going to be, finally ushering in 7nm).
