Some good news for current Ryzen owners

[Spooktra]

According to an interview with AMD's James Prior, second generation Ryzen cpu's will use current AM4 sockets and current Ryzen owners will be able to seamlessly upgrade to Pinnacle Ridge with just a BIOS update and AMD plans on using the current AM4 socket until 2020, so current Ryzen owners should have a stable upgrade path for 2 or 3 cpu generations.

Pinnacle Ridge is slated to arrive in February 2018, the early leaks seem to indicate that the desktop cpu's will still max out at 8C/16T but one would expect some IPC and AVX improvements.

Looking forward to 2018.

[audir8]

Considering AM4 is dual-channel DDR4, 8C/16T might be the most we'll see. IPC/AVX256 (in 1 cycle instead of 2) improvements are likely to make the processors be more memory bandwidth starved. They could also increase infinitiy fabric speed, and get a good performance boost across the board.

If Intel really starts competing with 8C/16T i7s, maybe AMD will add another CCX (CL is 6C12T max). More likely, we'll see desktop APUs hopefully with a shared L4 cache with a Vega 20/30. That would be a worthy upgrade from 1400/1600/1700/1800.

[chithanh]

I think this has been known for some time already.
On AMD's Ryzen Pro website, it is written that:

AM4 infrastructure available for 4+ years and compatible n-2, n-1 and n+1 generation.

So AM4 Zen mobos will be compatible with BR, Zen and Zen 2, while AM4 Zen 2 mobos will be compatible with BR, Zen, Zen 2 and Zen 3, if my interpretation is correct.

However, I hope that upcoming revisions of the AM4 socket will allow for more PCIe lanes and PCIe 4.0. The 20+4 PCIe 3.0 lanes are barely enough today and certainly insufficient by 2020.

[audir8]

It seems like there will be a Zen+, and a Zen 2 on the current AM4 from my reading in 2018, and 2019 respectively, possibly a Zen 3 as well by 2020. Intel seems to want to compete with 8C/16T i7 processors, so it's more likely we will see AMD add another CCX to 1700/1800 successors. Going up to 4.5+Ghz like Intel's offerings for single thread performance will likely need Global Foundry help.

I'm not sure if tying infinity fabric speed to DDR4 RAM speed is a good tradeoff, hypertransport was a fixed 3.2Ghz, and I hope future versions of infinity fabric can have a fixed frequency.

Asking for Vega APUs with PR, Matisse might be a little too much. Probably the same for asking RR or Picasso APUs get dedicated L4 cache.

[Melcar]

...I'm not sure if tying infinity fabric speed to DDR4 RAM speed is a good tradeoff...

Specially considering Ryzen in its current form is incredibly picky about RAM.

[audir8]

Specially considering Ryzen in its current form is incredibly picky about RAM.

I wouldn't say Ryzen is picky about RAM after AGESA updates, your motherboard might be, but I think almost everyone is able to go up to 2400-2800. AMD choose to couple Infinity Fabric and DDR4 speeds, when they didn't have to be given how they've used hypertransport in the past. Having DDR4 speeds of 3200-3600-4000 and beating i7-7700s when you could have similar performance if Infinity Fabric was a fixed 2Ghz and DDR4 speed was a normal 2666Mhz would be a much better engineering/resources/price trade-off, atleast in Ryzen 5/7.