AMD AM4 coolers might still be useful for a few years from now
During a series of interviews with PC World, AMD employees have revealed some details on the AM5 platform for next-gen CPUs.
In a roundtable interview, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su confirmed that AMD has plans to keep the AM5 platform as long-loved as AM4. The current platform has been around for a few years but has seen a few iterations that brought support for faster memory or new PCI-Express standards. The future of the AM5 is not exactly known, but the team behind Ryzen success has definitely learned a lot, so maybe there won’t at least be an issue of a BIOS not capable of supporting more SKUs simply because of its size…
“Well, we’ve been extremely pleased with how AM4 has evolved….we said we would keep that socket for a long time and we have. We continue to believe that it has been good for the community and frankly, it’s been good for us as well. As we bring things along, it was time to do a socket transition for the new I/O in the new technology, but I think strategy-wise, it should be similar. I don’t have an exact number of years but I would say that you should expect that AM5 will be a long-lived platform as AM4 has been. I think we’re expecting AM4 to stay in the marketplace for quite some years and it will be sort of an overlapping type of thing.”
— Dr. Lisa Su
AMD on choosing LGA and cooler AMD compatibility
Furthermore, we have a video interview with Robert Hallock (Director of Technical Marketing) and Frank Azor (Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions) who were asked about AMD AM5 platform design, such as why it has AMD moved to LGA instead of making another PGA processor. Hallock responded that this decision was solely based on the pin density that was required for the next-gen connectivity and interfaces (such as PCIe Gen5 or DDR5). The platform simply needed to have more connections with the CPU and the pin-based PGA CPUs simply were not for this task.
AMD Zen4 desktop (Ryzen 7000) integrated heat spreader design has been chosen not for its looks, but to make room for the capacitors that would otherwise have to be installed on the other side of the processor. The decision to place them on the same size as the IHS has given AMD a chance to put more pads on the bottom of the processor and as a result retain the same package size as AM4 processors.
With this in mind, Hallock confirmed that AM4 coolers will be compatible with future AM5 CPUs. Of course, the details are not yet known, such as thermal density, power requirements, and so on, but there is a good chance that high-end air and AIO coolers are ready for the new platform.
Source PCWorld
