Giga Computing, the enterprise arm of Gigabyte, recently announced a couple of servers based on AMD's Zen 4 processors. But, more importantly, the manufacturer confirmed that the successor to the Ryzen 7000 lineup, which offers some of the best CPUs on the market, will arrive later this year.

Like the AM4 socket, the AM5 socket will house several generations of Ryzen processors. AMD has given its word to support the AM5 socket until 2025. It's common knowledge that Zen 5 will succeed Zen 4. AMD's last desktop processor roadmap has Zen 5 for 2024. Gigabyte's statement implies that AMD may have accelerated the launch date for Zen 5 so the next-generation processors could hit the retail market before the end of the year. There is a possibility the next-generation chips that Gigabyte's referring to could be the rumored Zen 4 refresh (Zen 4+), though.

"Even though these new products are entry-level servers, CPU support does not end here and the AM5 platform is supported until at least 2025. In addition, the next generation of AMD Ryzen desktop processors that will come out later this year will also be supported on this AM5 platform, so customers who purchase these servers today have the opportunity to upgrade to the Ryzen 7000 series successor," wrote Gigabyte in its press release.

Zen 5 lacks a commercial name, but assuming that AMD follows the naming sequence, the upcoming chips should debut as Ryzen 8000. AMD has grown fond of using the names of famous painters as codenames for the chipmaker's previous generations of desktop Ryzen processors. For example, Ryzen 7000 was Raphael, Ryzen 5000 was Vermeer, and the earlier Ryzen 3000 was Matisse. Likewise, AMD alludes to Zen 5 as Granite Ridge, seemingly returning to the days of using places. Ryzen 1000 and Ryzen 2000 were Summit Ridge and Pinnacle Ridge, respectively.

There is little information available about Zen 5. AMD only confirmed that Granite Ridge uses an "advanced node," which limits the possibilities to TSMC's 3nm or 4nm process nodes. A very early leak claims that Zen 5 will use the latter. But 3nm variants will likely arrive at a later date. Furthermore, AMD has previously referred to Zen 5 as a "new grounds-up microarchitecture," implying Zen 5 won't just be a simple upgrade over Zen 4. Nevertheless, the general expectation is that Zen 5 could deliver substantially higher performance and efficiency than Zen 4.

It wasn't a long time ago that AMD unleashed the company's Ryzen 7000X3D V-Cache processors. However, it seems premature that the chipmaker will launch Zen 5 since the company had targeted a 2024 release. AM4 was the home to four generations (Zen, Zen+, Zen 2, Zen 3) of desktop Ryzen processors. AM5 with Ryzen 7000 in September 2022. With less than a year under its belt, there's reportedly a successor waiting in place. There's no doubt that AM5 will have a similar or even superior longevity than AM4.