In early 2017, AMD released the first Zen processors for socket AM4, and had promised to support that platform until at least 2020. 3 solid years of support sounds great for a socket, but what ended up actually happening went far beyond their original promise. They continued to release new Zen 3 CPUs up until late last year with the advent of the region-specific release of the 5500X3D, which makes AM4 support span a ludicrous 9 years, with firmware updates still being supplied to this day.

The Zen 4 desktop architecture launched in September 2022, and featured the new AM5 socket. Because of AMD's commitment to AM4 support and their overall dominance of the CPU market (especially for gaming), I feel totally validated in investing in the AM5 platform because I can trust it to last.

AM4 users are still going strong

And for good reason

Buying into the AM4 platform way back in 2017 wasn't a trivial choice. Intel was still king of the castle, and even if Ryzen 1000 CPUs offered compelling price-to-performance ratios, many still went with Intel for fear of new architecture teething issues, and that choice is just as valid. Much of the market share AMD has now was gained much later in AM4's lifecycle. Saying that about a CPU socket would typically mean a lot of users getting locked into a platform with little in the way of an upward upgrade path, but AM4 supports so many different CPUs, it's extremely likely that you don't have the best one of the stack, meaning there's still some upward mobility for you.

Intel has pushed me away with all its "socket-hopping"

Surely you could've planned for a socket that allows for more future performance

Contrast this with Intel's treatment of sockets and platforms, and it's no wonder why AM4 users feel so justified. If we count the number of sockets Intel released during AM4's lifespan, there are 4: LGA 1200, LGA 1700, and LGA 1851. If you want to get into semantics, you could say that LGA 1151 was also relevant during this time, but it predates AM4 by just over a year. In those 4 sockets, there are a total of 8(!) different CPU architectures released for the desktop market. Many of these sockets only supported 2 different generations of CPUs before Intel switched to a new socket. This didn't always mean users upgrading would need new RAM, but it almost always necessitated a motherboard swap, further adding to the cost of an already premium platform.

I had this experience personally: I had a Skylake-based system in 2016, featuring an i7-7700K. By the time it made sense for me to upgrade, Intel had already moved from the LGA 1151 socket to LGA 1200, making my upgrade to a Comet Lake i7-10700K a lot pricier.

I have a long-term base instead of another part I have to continuously upgrade

The foundation is there

When I can actually trust that the CPU socket will be around for more than a couple of generations, I can feel good about investing more money into the parts around my Ryzen 7 7800X3D. This makes splurging on that expensive motherboard a much easier pill to swallow. The very tangible benefits of great I/O and more expansion support certainly aren't lost on me, but paying more for things like more robust power delivery and higher quality components doesn't feel like a total waste because I know the system will be around for more than a couple of years.

The same goes for memory, and that makes sense now more than it ever has. Obviously, if the DDR5 standard gets replaced by DDR6 sometime in the lifecycle of AM5, it's likely that AMD would move to a new socket to accommodate that, necessitating an upgrade of my motherboard if I wanted to move to the newer platform. It doesn't look like a new memory standard is due anytime soon, though, so my investment in 64 GB of 6000MHz DDR5 looks pretty good.

There's no guarantee that AM5 lasts as long as its predecessor

Zen 7 could be on a different platform

Trusting a platform to support as many CPUs as AM4 is a long shot, especially considering AMD didn't intend on supporting the socket for that long. Innovations like the dual-CCD X3D chips gave AM4 a lot more runway, and you can't count on a game-changing innovation like that to come along during a socket's lifespan. While Zen 6 is confirmed to be on the AM5 socket, there's been no confirmation if Zen 7 is, and we still don't have a great picture of performance for the future architecture. Upgrading from Zen 4 to Zen 5 isn't super compelling outside of climbing the X3D ladder, so it's yet to be seen if AM5 has similar "legs" to AM4.

2 more architectures above my current CPU give me enough runway to be comfortable

If I’m buying into AM5, I’m more willing to spend on the parts that don’t age out quickly: a motherboard with the right balance of quality and features, a PSU that I’ll happily keep through multiple GPU generations, cooling that won’t become the bottleneck, and storage that I can expand without regret. While the jump from Zen 4 to Zen 5 wasn't massive, having at least one more future architecture above that means there will be a decent chunk of performance uplift on the table for me to grab with a simple in-socket upgrade.