AMD hints at excellent DDR5 RAM overclocking capabilities for the upcoming Zen 4 Raphael desktop processors

DDR5 did not really have a big impact on the industry when it launched in late 2021, and Intel was clearly prepared for this outcome, otherwise it would not offer support for both DDR4 and DDR5 RAM on the Alder Lake motherboards. The almost non-existent performance gains at officially supported speeds (DDR5-4800) combined with high latencies at overclocked specs and the unjustified price premium over the DDR4 models did not help for the early adoption of the new standard. At least Intel was first to offer DDR5 for the consumer market, so that helped rebuild the reputation, but the company probably intended this as a test run at best.

AMD, on the other hand, did not rush to offer DDR5 support for the desktop products, and just recently introduced DDR5 support for the laptop-grade Ryzen 6000 APUs. However, Team Red is planning to not only offer full DDR5 support for the upcoming Zen 4 Raphael desktop processors releasing in 2H22, but also integrate excellent overclocking features that could truly highlight the potential of the DDR5 technology. Of course, Intel will have a similar solution ready with the introduction of the Raptor Lake platform around the same time.

We are still quite a few months away from the official launch of the Zen 4 processors, and AMD is already in full hype campaign for the new AM5 platform features. Team Red recently held a Meet The Experts webinar where Memory Enabling Manager Joseph Tao talked about the DDR5 capabilities of the upcoming Zen 4 Raphael platform:

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, may be possible with this overclocking spec.

Right now, Intel’s Alder Lake memory controller can handle RAM specs close to DDR5-6000 in a stable manner, but the performance gains do not seem worth the price premium when most DDR5 kits are at least three times more expensive than DDR4 ones. Hopefully AMD’s Zen 4 platform and the upcoming Intel Rapor Lake can offer better memory controllers ready to handle faster specs like DDR5-8000 and even ADATA's DDR5-12600 announced last year, without introducing too much latency. As disclosed earlier this year, AMD is looking to introduce an alternative for Intel’s XMP 3.0 named RAMP (Ryzen Accelerated Memory Profile).

Buy the G.Skill Trident Z5 Series DDR5-6400 32GB memory kit on Amazon