AMD has confirmed that PCIe 5.0 SSDs will launch alongside the Zen 4 AM5 platform later this year. It is actively working with the storage industry to ensure next-generation drivers are available when the platform goes live, and hopes to make it the platform of choice with support for Zen 2 – PCIe 4.0. .
At this year's Computex, AMD has already revealed a lot of exciting information about its Zen 5.5 architecture, from hitting 9GHz when running Ghostwire Tokyo to beating Intel's Core i12900 4KS in Blender rendering.
On the connectivity front, the Ryzen 7000 promises some big things with PCIe 5.0 graphics cards and support for NVMe storage when it launches this year.
AMD; It's transitioning to a new AM5 platform with Zen 5.0, which includes things like DDR4 support, plenty of USB connections, a switch to having pins located on the motherboard instead of the CPU, and of course the aforementioned PCIe 5 support.
The platform as a whole (i.e. processor and motherboard chipset together) will offer up to 24 PCIe 5.0 connections, with at least four of which will be dedicated to next-gen storage.
AMD announced three different motherboard chipsets at Computex: X670 Extreme, X670 and B650. There are varying levels of PCIe 5.0 graphics support from motherboards packing these chipsets, and the B650 sticks to PCIe 4.0 graphics, but they all support at least one PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD drive.
While having a slot to house your next-gen storage is only part of the equation, you also need real PCIe 5.0 SSDs.
As David McAfee said in the Computex keynote, “AMD has partnered with storage device manufacturers like Crucial and Micron, as well as Phison, to bring this incredible performance boost to the AM5 platform.”
“We expect to see the first devices from Crucial and Micron available in the consumer market timed with the introduction of the AM5 ecosystem. This will be followed shortly by new devices from partners from Gigabyte, MSI, Corsair and more.”
Even at this early stage of development, this partnership sees inline production achieve an improvement of over 60% over the current generation. When you consider that the best PCIe 4.0 drives hit 7.300MB/s, that means they're already approaching 12GB/s with early silicon.
It's fair to say that sequential throughput isn't huge for gamers, as games rarely pull in a lot of data at once, but that may change as DirectStorage starts to take hold. AMD has listed its SmartAccess Storage to support DirectStorage on its Radeon GPUs. We expect straight sequential output to be more important as the data is transferred to the GPU. Fast pipeline transfer is also useful for Windows when navigating larger files; for example video-capture will benefit from this.
The first NVMe PCIe 5.0 drivers will be released when the Ryzen 7000 is released. We don't have an exact date for when that will happen beyond the time frame, but the fact that AMD has made a lot of announcements at this year's Computex is a sign that things are going well.
