More I/O For AM5: PCIe 5, Additional PCIe Lanes, & More Displays

AMD’s other big expenditure using socket AM5’s additional pins is on I/O support. While AM4 already supported a fair bit of I/O, including 24 PCIe lanes, 3 displays, and 4 Superspeed USB ports, there was still room for improvement. So for AM5, AMD has increased the amount of I/O and the flexibility offered with the platform.

The biggest change here is that the AM5 socket now provides for 28 lanes of PCIe, a net gain of 4 lanes. More significantly still, PCIe 5.0 is now supported (at least on the Ryzen 7000 “Raphael” processors), doubling the bandwidth of all of those PCIe lanes to a max of 4GB/sec/lane. Which gives the chip a maximum cumulative PCIe bandwidth of 112GB/sec in each direction.

In practice, those additional lanes are intended for NVMe drives, giving AM5 a second x4 connection to drive a second NVMe drive; though we have seen some motherboard designs where vendors are stealing the second x4 for a PCIe 5.0 x4 slot. Past that, things look a lot like AM4, with 16 PCIe lanes to directly drive one or more PCIe slots, and then 4 lanes for hooking up the chipset.

Meanwhile, the updated socket also offers enough pins for the CPU to drive 4 Superspeed USB 3.x ports, and a USB 2 port. The USB 2 port is new for this generation, and meanwhile 3 of those USB 3 ports now also support the USB Type-C connector, unlike AM4 which could only natively drive Type-A ports. As a result, AM5 CPUs can drive a total of 3 Superspeed Type-C ports, a fourth Superspeed Type-A port, and then the aforementioned USB 2 port.

There has been one regression, however, and that is SATA support. Whereas AM4 CPUs could drive a mix of NVMe and SATA drives (up to 2 SATA + a PCIe x2 for NVMe), AM5 is purely PCIe. So there is no native SATA support on the CPU, and supplying that will come from the chipset.

To visualize this, we’ll use part of the AM5 chipset diagram. We’ll go more into the specifics of the chipsets in a bit, but lays out what is wired to the CPU, and what will need to be wired to the chipset. Of note there, the current chipsets only use PCIe 4.0 connectivity to the Ryzen CPU, so the current generation of chipsets will not be making full use of the bandwidth capabilities of the CPU itself.

Which with the addition of PCIe 5.0 support to the platform, is going to be a recurring theme. While AMD has baked in 5.0 support into the Raphael CPUs, it’s up to motherboard vendors to actually make it so. Compared to PCIe 4.0, 5.0 has much tighter signal integrity requirements (the signaling frequency has been doubled), which at least at this time, makes PCIe 5.0 expensive to implement. A very well-designed motherboard is required with impeccable traces, and on top of that the overall short throw of PCIe 5.0 means that retimers/redrivers become necessary rather quickly. So while AM5 can support PCIe 5.0 throughout, the reality is that we’re still going to see a lot of PCIe 4.0 in use even in higher-end motherboards.

As for the necessity of PCIe 5.0 overall, thus far AMD is primarily focused on what it means for NVMe drive speeds. The first generation of PCIe 5.0-enabled consumer SSDs are expected to land a bit later this year, and they should be able to hit sequential burst transfer rates above the limits of PCIe 4.0 (~7GB/sec).

Past that, NVIDIA’s newly announced Ada Lovelace architecture GeForce RTX 40 series video cards do not support PCIe 5.0. So while we’re awaiting AMD to announce their RDNA 3-based product lineup later this year, regardless of what AMD does, the bulk of video cards sold next year are not going to use PCIe 5.0. So there is a bit less pressure on motherboard manufactures (and motherboard buyers) to get boards that support PCIe 5.0 to anything beyond a couple of M.2 slots.

Finally, in conjunction with the USB I/O changes, AM5 also introduces some display I/O changes. Whereas AM4 could directly drive up to 3 displays, AM5 brings this to 4. Specifically, AM5 offers one dedicated display output (which will generally be allocated to HDMI), while the other 3 display outputs are available over those 3 USB Type-C ports as DisplayPort alt mode. It’ll be up to motherboard manufacturers if they want to expose any of these USB-C root ports as physical USB-C ports or as DisplayPorts, but so far from the motherboard designs we’ve seen, the former is more common (though certainly not universal).

Anticipating a shift to more USB Type-C displays, AMD is also implementing what they call “hybrid graphics” support on AM5. Unlike previous products where this referred to linking up the integrated graphics with a discrete GPU in CrossFire mode, this time around it refers to being able to being able to use the mobo/iGPU’s display outputs to drive a monitor while using a dGPU to render content. This is largely lifted from AMD’s laptop technologies, where similar techniques are used to allow the dGPU to be powered down when it’s not in use. In the case of desktop processors, this just means every display output will work, regardless of whether it’s plugged into ports coming from the CPU or a discrete video card.

It’s also worth noting that AM5 is bringing a few other, more minor updates to other comms protocols. Among these is support for MIPI’s (relatively) new I3C chip-to-chip signaling standard, which will ultimately be supplanting the long-used I2C standard. As well, AM5 doubles the number of I2C/I3C ports available, bringing the total to 4 ports. The platform also adds a second (enhanced) Serial Peripheral Interface (eSPI/SPI) port, and on the audio front, adds support for the Digital Mic and MIPI’s Soundwire standard for low-cost audio peripherals.

Socket AM5: The New Platform for Consumer AMD AM5 Chipsets: X670 and B650, Built by ASMedia
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  • jakky567 - Monday, September 26, 2022 - link

    I'm confused by USB 2, do you mean USB 2.0 or USB 4v2, or what?
  • Ryan Smith - Monday, September 26, 2022 - link

    Yes, USB 2.0.

    USB 4v2 was just announced. We're still some time off from it showing up in any AMD products.
  • Myrandex - Thursday, September 29, 2022 - link

    lol did they share any reason why to give a single USB 2.0 port?
  • Ryan Smith - Friday, September 30, 2022 - link

    Basic, low complexity I/O. Implementing a USB 2.x port is relatively simple these days. It's a bit of a failsafe, really.
  • LuxZg - Monday, September 26, 2022 - link

    One question and one observation.

    Q: ECO mode says 170W -> 105W but tested CPU was 170W -> 65W. Is that a typo or was that just to show off? I wish that sample graph showed 7600X at 105W and 65W in addition to 7950X at 170/105/65W.

    Observation: 5800X is 260$ on Amazon. So with cheaper DDR4, cheaper MBOs, and cheaper CPU, it will be big competition inside AMD's own house. At least for those that don't "need" PCIe 5.0 or future proofing.
  • andrewaggb - Monday, September 26, 2022 - link

    I was confused by that as well.
    The way I read the paragraph suggested 170w eco mode is 105w but then it's stated the cpu was tested at 65w. Was it meant to say 105w or can a 170w be dialed down to 65w and the test is correctly labelled?
  • Otritus - Monday, September 26, 2022 - link

    By default while under 95*C, 203*F, 368.15K, the 7950X will have a TDP of 170 watts and use up to 230 watts of power. You can think of it like TDP and Turbo Power on Intel. Eco mode will reduce TDP to 105 watts (and use up to 142 watts??). You can manually set the power limits, and Anandtech set them to 65 watts to demonstrate efficiency. Meaning the 7950X was not in eco mode, but a manual mode more efficient than eco mode.
  • uefi - Monday, September 26, 2022 - link

    Just by supporting Microsoft's cloud connected hardware DRM makes the 7000 series vastly inferior to all current Intel CPUs.
  • Makaveli - Monday, September 26, 2022 - link

    So you are saying intel is not going to implement this in any of their Future processors?

    If the Raptorlake review shows it supports that also i'm going to back to this message.
  • socket420 - Monday, September 26, 2022 - link

    I don't understand where these "intel rulez because they don't use pluton!!" people are coming from - one, the Intel Management Engine... exists, and two, Microsoft explicitly stated that Pluton was developed with the support of AMD, Intel and Qualcomm back in 2020. Intel is clearly on-board with it and I expect to see Pluton included in Raptor Lake or Meteor Lake, they're just late to the party because that's what Intel does best, I guess?

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