Today at Computex 2022, AMD"s CEO and President Lisa Su took to stage to present her company"s keynote presentation, where she talked about the company"s vision, and also introduced new products including the new Zen 4 architecture and Socket AM5 motherboard.
And although AM5 (LGA1718) is AMD"s new socket with many features like DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 support, among others, the Santa Clara company also confirmed that the existing Socket AM4 will be around for a while as President Su stated during the Computex keynote presentation that "AM4 is a great platform that will continue for many years to come".
Although it isn"t explicitly stated whether AMD will continue providing future AGESA and firmware updates for AM4, nor has the company promised new AM4-based CPUs today, there are other positives we can take away from this.
DDR5 memory is still very expensive compared to DDR4, and currently, the next-gen memory standard does not really offer much more than what we already have with DDR4. The speeds on DDR5 aren"t high enough yet to justify the poor CAS latencies (CL) compared to DDR4 and outside of integrated graphics, the benefits of DDR5 currently make it a very poor value proposition for general usage.
Another benefit of AM4"s longevity is the fact that users can also re-use their old coolers with a new AM5 socket as AMD has confirmed complete cooler compatibility between AM4 and AM5. This means that if someone gets an AM4 platform now in 2022 with a very expensive cooler, they can re-use that on a new AM5 platform in case they go for an upgrade.
Source: AMD (YouTube)