AMD confirms first PCIe 5.0 SSDs will launch alongside Zen 4

It has been verified by AMD that PCIe 5.0 solid-state drives will be available at the same time as the Zen 4 AM5 platform when it is made available later on in this year. It is actively working with the storage industry to guarantee that next-gen drives are ready for when the platform goes live. Its hope is obviously to make it the platform of choice for storage heads, similar to how it succeeded to accomplish this with Zen 2 and the support for PCIe 4.0.

At this year’s Computex, AMD has already revealed a lot of interesting information about its Zen 4 architecture. Some of these revelations include the fact that it is capable of reaching 5.5GHz when running Ghostwire Tokyo and that it is superior to Intel’s Core i9 12900KS when rendering in Blender. When Ryzen 7000 is introduced later this year, it will have support for PCIe 5.0 graphics cards and NVMe storage right out of the gate. This will be one of the key things that Ryzen 7000 promises to deliver when it comes to connection.

With the release of Zen 4, AMD is transitioning to a new platform known as AM5, which includes features such as support for DDR5 memory, an abundance of USB connectivity, a switch to placing the pins on the motherboard rather than the CPU, and, of course, the PCIe 5.0 support that was previously mentioned.

At Computex, AMD presented a total of three distinct chipsets for motherboards: the X670 Extreme, the X670, and the B650. The motherboards that pack these chipsets offer varied degrees of compatibility for PCI Express 5.0 graphics, with the B650 only offering support for PCI Express 4.0 graphics; however, all of them offer support for at least one PCI Express 5.0 NVMe solid state drive. Fantastic news for those who are storage addicts.

However, having a slot into which you can slide your storage of the next generation is only one half of the puzzle; in addition, you will require actual PCIe 5.0 SSDs. Robert Hallock, an AMD representative, stated in our pre-briefing for Computex that “We’re working very hard with our partners to make PCIe Gen 5 available.” AMD is on the case.

“AMD has teamed with Phison as well as storage device vendors like Crucial, and Micron to offer this fantastic performance boost to the AM5 platform,” David McAfee remarked during the main Computex speech. “We anticipate that the first products from Crucial and Micron will become available in the consumer market at approximately the same time that the AM5 ecosystem will be launched. After that, more products were released by other partners such as Gigabyte, MSI, and Corsair, amongst many others, not long after that.”

Even at this early level of development, this alliance is experiencing sequential throughput that is over 60 percent better than the generation that is currently in use. When you take into account the fact that the best PCIe 4.0 drives touch 7,300 MB/s, this indicates that they are already getting close to 12 GB/s with early technology. Impressive.

As things are right now, it’s safe to assume that sequential throughput isn’t a significant deal for gamers. This is because games rarely pull off a load of data in one go. However, this could change as DirectStorage begins to take root. We anticipate that straight sequential performance will become more significant as world and level data is transmitted through to the GPU. AMD has its SmartAccess Storage ready to support DirectStorage on its Radeon GPUs when that time comes. A fast sequential throughput is also beneficial for Windows when moving larger files around; for example, video capture will benefit from this.