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AMD's First Ryzen CPU With Alleged DDR5 Support Emerges
Proficient hardware detective Benchleaks has stumbled upon what appears to be one of AMD's upcoming Ryzen processors with DDR5 support. It remains to be seen whether it's a desktop or mobile chip, but the unannounced processor will undoubtedly challenge the best CPUs on the market.
The Ryzen processor is an engineering sample (ES) with the "100-000000560-40_Y" identifier. It reportedly sports eight cores and 16 threads. The anonymous submitter paired the processor with 16GB of memory clocked at 4,800 MHz. Given the data rate, the memory reeks of DDR5 or LPDDR5. AMD's Raphael (Zen 4) desktop processors and Rembrandt (Zen 3+) mobile APUs have been rumored to support DDR5.
The processor's other specifications are unknown at this point. The codename does suggest that the Ryzen part has a 4 GHz base clock. The chip was inside an unreleased Asus M3402RA device, which is probably a laptop. The company's Vivobook Pro 14 and 15 OLED models carry the M3401 and M3500 part numbers, making the M3402RA a revamped version of the Vivobook Pro 14. Furthermore, the testing was done at 2560 x 1600, which is a popular resolution for laptops. If our hunch is correct, the octa-core processor is probably from the Rembrandt family, the alleged successor to Cezanne.
Rembrandt is the purported codename for AMD's Ryzen 6000 processors. If the rumors are accurate, Rembrandt won't offer a huge upgrade in terms of computing performance since the APUs reportedly use an enhanced version of AMD's Zen 3 cores (Zen 3+). On the graphics side, however, Rembrandt may leverage the power of RDNA 2 graphics. This part is the most exciting aspect since consumers have been longing for an RDNA 2-powered APU. We've already gotten a taste of what the RDNA 2 iGPU inside Ryzen 6000 can do in an early benchmark.
AMD Eng Sample: 100-000000560-40_Y (Image credit: Business Applications Performance Corporation)
The processor's performance wasn't very impressive, but it's an engineering sample so don't be too hard on it. Besides, Business Applications Performance Corporation (BAPCo), the company behind CrossMark, has a tight past with Intel, so the benchmark isn't very nice to AMD processors.
The CrossMark submission revealed the AMD chip with an overall score of 1,426 points. It finished the productivity, creativity and responsiveness tests with 1,442 points, 1,492 points and 1,269 points, respectively. Performance-wise, the AMD processor was right up the alley of the Ryzen 7 5800H (Cezanne) and Intel's Core i7-10870H (Comet Lake) processor. However, the Core i7-11800H (Tiger Lake) chip is still faster, so we'll have to wait for the retail samples of the AMD chip to compare.
AMD has already announced its CES 2022 keynote, where CEO Dr. Lisa Su will “highlight innovations and solutions featuring upcoming AMD Ryzen processors and AMD Radeon graphics.” We don't know if Rembrandt will be a strong competitor for mobile Alder Lake, given that the APUs are on Zen 3+.
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Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.
One question that we need to wait to see is if AMD actually does the design work to take advantage of DDR5 memory. From the lack of significant changes to performance between DDR4 and DDR5 in Alder Lake, Intel clearly didn't do any real optimization for DDR5, and just slapped the support in there, but making the link between RAM and CPU cores too generalized to really benefit from one or the other type of memory. Since AMD didn't rush the DDR5 based products out the door, AMD has been in the position to make it so the higher price of DDR5 may actually be worth the higher price.
