AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs & AM5 Platform Will Only Support DDR5 Memory, Comes With EXPO ‘Memory Profile’ Technology

AMD's Ryzen 7000 CPUs and the respective AM5 platform are now expected to feature support for only DDR5 memory.

There have been many hints by AMD in the past suggesting that the AM5 platform and the Ryzen 7000 CPUs will be based around the DDR5 memory standard. More recently, during the Meet The Experts webinar, AMD's representatives confirmed that Raphael, codename for Ryzen 7000 CPUs based on Zen 4 core architecture, will be their first DDR5 gaming platform. As such, users running DDR4 memory will have to say goodbye when moving to the new platform.

In the same report by Tomshardware which talked about the X670 chipset being a dual-chiplet design, the tech outlet states that AMD's X670 and B650 chipset powered motherboards will be DDR5-Only. Now while there might be some speculation that a lower-tier A620 chipset allows DDR4 support, that won't be the case since the leaked AM5 feature compatibility list confirms that the socket will only be compliant with DDR5 memory and there's no mention of DDR4 memory.

Editor from @ComputerBase posted this already few days ago in their forum.

Socket AM5 guide, in the 254-page document you can find the text "DDR5" 76 times, "DDR4" never.

Some hoped that AMD would support DDR4 on AM5. https://t.co/kO5zfGhnix pic.twitter.com/MQPBr9ocgU

— CapFrameX (@CapFrameX) April 25, 2022

But considering that AMD is moving to DDR5 in the second half of 2022, it's good news for those who are looking forward to upgrading as DDR5 prices continue to fall & availability is just so much better than what it was a few months back during Intel's 12th Gen Alder Lake launch. However, the blue team is providing their users with the options to select between both DDR5 and DDR4 choices. AMD might be in a difficult position as they won't have a higher-end option that comes with DDR4 memory support and users will have to pay much higher prices to hop onboard the new standard.

Besides the DDR5-Only approach, AMD's AM5 platform for Ryzen 7000 CPUs is also expected to come with a host of new technologies. One of these technologies has been detailed by Videocardz. Known as EXPO or Extended Profiles For Overclocking, this new feature will allow AM5 boards to store two memory overclocking profiles which include:

AMD EXPO will be able to work with UDIMM, RDIMM, and SO-DIMM which opens up the tech for use in mobile platforms too. Now what isn't known is whether this technology replaces RAMP (Ryzen Accelerated Memory Profile) which was previously said to be coming to the new AMD CPU platforms or if it is an extension of that.

Our first DDR5 platform for gaming is our Raphael platform and one of the awesome things about Raphael is that we are really gonna try to make a big splash with overclocking and I'll just kinda leave it there but speeds that you maybe thought couldn't be possible, maybe possible with this overclocking spec.

Joseph Tao, Memory Enabling Manager at AMD

The trademark does reveal that it was filed very recently (February) so it looks like the red team would just end up using this name. Certain monitoring & statistics software have already added preliminary support for RAMP so they might need to update them if AMD switches over to the new EXPO branding.

News Source: Videocardz