Vendor readies AMD motherboards for Zen 5 CPUs — FireRangePi 1.1.7.0 AGESA for AM5 makes way for Ryzen 9000

HXL on X (Twitter) reports that MSI has officially released new UEFI firmware updates for its AM5 motherboards featuring "next-gen" CPU support. These updates reportedly support AMD's upcoming Ryzen 9000 CPUs, which will come with the Zen 5 CPU architecture.

Asus was the first motherboard manufacturer to adopt AGESA 1.1.7.0, with MSI being the latest board maker to utilize the new firmware update. AGESA 1.1.7.0 reportedly supports AMD Granite Ridge CPUs and Fire Range, believed to be AMD's next-generation Ryzen APUs based on Zen 5.

Zen 5 is AMD's next-generation CPU architecture that will succeed Zen 4. Little is known about this new architecture, but we've seen leaks that Zen 5 allegedly offers a 15% increased IPC improvement over Zen 4. The most significant improvements will come from the core and cache designs, which will be more advanced and boast even larger cache capacities than what Zen 4 is capable of today. Inevitably, AMD will also use a much newer TSMC process node, improving efficiency and potentially boosting clock speeds beyond the Ryzen 7000.

Granite Ridge is the codename for AMD's purported Ryzen 9000 series lineup, which will consist entirely of CPUs using a chiplet-style design philosophy. Fire Range is the codename for AMD's "Ryzen 10000" (or however they brand it) APUs, which will come with high-performance RDNA-based graphics and an XDNA-based NPU. These chips will be the successor to AMD's recently released Ryzen 8000G (Phoenix) desktop APUs and are expected to use a monolithic die just like all of AMD's current and previous APU designs.

Zen 5 is expected to arrive sometime this fall, which explains why AMD and its board partners are already publishing Zen 5-enabled BIOS updates. Asus and MSI are the only board makers that have already updated AGESA 1.1.7.0. But expect Gigabyte, ASRock, and the rest of AMD's board partners to follow suit shortly.