What just happened? Gigabyte has officially confirmed that AMD's next-gen processor lineup will be marketed under the "Ryzen 9000" moniker. The confirmation seemingly scotches rumors that Team Red could switch up its naming convention and use the Ryzen 8000 branding for the Zen 5 chips that are launching this year.
The information comes from a new Gigabyte press release notifying users of the latest AGESA 1.1.7.0 beta BIOS release that makes its current AM5 motherboards (X670, B650, and A620-series products) compatible with AMD's next-gen processors. Asus and MSI confirmed support last week, but only mentioned "next-gen AMD Ryzen CPUs" rather than revealing the official branding for the upcoming lineup.
Codenamed "Granite Ridge," the Ryzen 9000-series desktop processors will be based on the Zen 5 architecture and be an upgrade over the Zen 4-based "Raphael" CPUs released in late 2022. While AMD has already announced that the first batch of Zen 5-based SKUs will debut later this year, unconfirmed rumors suggest that they could be showcased at Computex 2024 in June before going on sale a few months later.
Alongside Granite Ridge, Zen 5 is also expected to power the "Strix Point" APUs, tipped to release later this year. However, unlike the Ryzen 9000 series, these are said to combine Zen 5 and Zen 5c cores and include more powerful integrated graphics. Zen 5 is also expected to power the "Fire Range" mobile CPUs and "Strix Halo" APUs that are rumored to be released in 2025.
AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su has already confirmed that Zen 5-based CPUs for both client and server applications will launch in the second half of 2024. A recent leak also suggested that Zen 5 cores could be more than 40 percent faster than Zen 4, possibly making the next-gen processors significantly more powerful than their predecessors.
While AMD hasn't yet shared any Zen 5 benchmarks, it claims that the chips will offer improved performance and efficiency over Zen 4. Other improvements are said to be a re-pipelined front end, as well as integrated AI and machine learning optimizations. Overall, Zen 5 is likely to be a substantial upgrade over the current-generation processors, and the fact they will be supported by existing AM5 motherboards is probably the encouragement that many AMD users need to splurge on a new CPU this year.