AMD says DDR5 on Ryzen will reach ‘speeds you maybe thought couldn’t be possible’

AMD is making some bold claims regarding the performance of its upcoming Ryzen 7000 ‘Raphael’ desktop CPUs. On a recent webinar about DDR5 DRAM (spotted by WCCFTech), AMD reps explained how, with the help of Samsung, they’re confident that very high clock speeds are within view.

“Our first DDR5 platform for gaming is our Raphael platform, and one of the awesome things about Raphael is that we are really gonna try to make a big splash with overclocking,” said Joseph Tao, memory enabling manager at AMD. “And I’ll just kinda leave it there, but speeds that you maybe thought couldn’t be possible may be possible with this overclocking spec.” 

We started getting excited about these Zen 4 Ryzen CPUs since they were revealed earlier this year at CES 2022 (look at that heat spreader!). The Ryzen 7000 desktop processors will arrive on a 5nm process node with PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 support on a new LGA 1718 socket. 

Currently, AMD is using Samsung’s latest DDR5 technology for its next-gen EPYC Genoa enterprise servers. DDR5 has twice the capacity and nearly four times the die density of DDR4 memory with reduced power consumption, which would help boost game performance. 

Some folks will be happy to hear any mention of overclocking on Raphael. AMD’s latest Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU doesn’t have overclocking support, which came as a bit of surprise for folks hoping they could squeeze as much performance as possible out of the costly Zen 3 chip. 

It would have been nice to see some numbers because “speeds that you maybe thought couldn’t be possible” is a great quote but gives us little idea of how fast we’re actually talking about here. And without any numbers, there’s no way for us to begin speculating about pricing, but we are so far thinking: not cheap. Though, if this DDR5 overclocking speed world record is any indicator, the potential for speeds over 9,000 megatransfers per second is already there. (That is very fast).

As AMD’s Zen 3 era comes to an end and the Zen 4 begins, we are excited to see what Team Red has in store for gaming on PC.