According to foreign media reports, the HWiNFO development team (a well-known hardware monitoring software) recently confirmed that they are adding AMD RAMP (Ryzen Accelerated Memory Profile) support to the latest version of the software.
Although the HWiNFO development team did not give any more explanation for AMD RAMP, a few days later, HWiNFO's developers confirmed on the forum that AMD RAMP is a new generation memory standard developed by AMD itself, similar to Intel's XMP, which will be used on Zen4's DDR5 platform.
As early as the success of the Ryzen™ 3000 series, many people in the industry are speculating that AMD may launch its own memory standards, and the follow-up AMD has indeed come up with optimization standards such as A-XMP and AMP. But fundamentally, AMD still lacks a real memory standard to advance its advantages in the hardware ecosystem, and now, it's coming.
AMD RAMP
Previously, HWiNFO listed the features that the new beta version will add in the new update list:
HWiNFO64 will be ported to Unicode.
Added support for Intel XMP 3.0 Revision 1.2.
Added sensor monitoring for ASRock B660 and H610 series motherboards.
Preliminary support for AMD RAMP has been added.
Added support for the future AMD AM5 platform.
The most talked about of this is naturally the fourth item, AMD RAMP also appeared in everyone's eyes for the first time, and then HWiNFO developers posted on the Computerbase forum to confirm that AMD RAMP is a technical support prepared by AMD for the next generation platform Ryzen 7000 series.
According to the explanation of HWiNFO developers, AMD RAMP will be launched on the AM5 platform and support the latest generation of Ryzen™ processors, through AMD RAMP technology, motherboard manufacturers and memory manufacturers can further adapt and optimize their respective products, so that the overall operational stability of the platform can be effectively improved. In addition, AMD RAMP technology will also bring a new AMD platform memory overclocking experience, which will be particularly important in the DDR5 memory era.
There is no doubt that AMD RAMP is a killer weapon prepared by AMD for Zen4, according to AMD, Zen4 will be launched later this year, and as soon as Q4 we can see a new generation of Ryzen™ processors appear in front of us.
Judging from the information currently exposed, the Zen4 architecture will bring a higher main frequency to the Ryzen™ processor, which may be the first official Ryzen processor to reach 5GHz, and the IPC improvement of Zen3 may be as high as 25%. In addition, Ryzen 3D V-Cache technology used on Ryzen 6000 series processors will also be used in Zen4.
Although Xiao Lei also wants to analyze the technical points and performance of AMD RAMP with you, but the current relevant information is almost pitiful, AMD officials have not made more explanations for this technology, only from Intel's XMP standard to guess, RAMP will at least bring more than 6000MHz of main frequency support for the AMD platform's DDR5 memory, and there will be better performance in terms of timing.
Why did AMD set its own memory standard?
Since AMD launched the Ryzen series of processors, the PC processor market is no longer a dominant situation, Intel with the Core processor to bring the right to speak and authority, is being challenged by AMD, and after several years of iterative upgrades, Ryzen processors have also successfully surpassed the Core processor, becoming the most popular personal PC processor.
I have to say that after AMD opened the prelude to the processor war, users also benefited a lot, and a few years ago, Xiao Lei could not believe that he could one day see an eight-core sixteen-thread processor with a main frequency of more than 4.5GHz, and the price was only more than 2,000 yuan.
The fierce competition in the processor market has also brought about changes in the entire PC ecosystem, making PC hardware manufacturers and users realize that the PC market is not Intel's word, they already have a second choice. With the rise of AMD, a series of hardware built around the AMD ecosystem are gradually emerging, including the results of AMD's own promotion and the results of spontaneous adaptation by manufacturers.
For example, in the field of memory, the high-end flagships of some memory brands have appeared "specially built for amd Ryzen™ platform" and other promotional words since the beginning of the Ryzen 3000 series to promote the stability and overclocking performance of their products on the AMD Ryzen™ platform. In other words, a few years ago, such publicity probably only attracted the ridicule of some PC enthusiasts, but now it has become one of the main selling points, of course, Intel has actually had similar publicity very early, making money, not chilling.
However, creating an AMD memory standard for the AMD platform does not mean that it is the use of AMD memory standards, in fact, AMD and Intel are currently using the same set of memory certification standards - XMP, and XMP is a set of memory certification standards proposed and led by Intel in 2007.
AMD has been using intel-led memory overclocking mechanisms for many years, so why not confirm Intel's market dominance? Of course, whether AMD admits it or not, no one can deny Intel's position as a market leader a few years ago, and even under the blow of Ryzen™s processors, today's Intel processors still occupy most of the market share.
Therefore, IF AMD wants to continue to fight with Intel and seize the right to speak in the market, then it will inevitably need a set of its own standards to form its own ecosystem. In fact, before RAMP, AMD also launched its own memory overclocking protocol on the basis of XMP, which are A-XMP and AMP, but fundamentally it still has not gotten rid of the dependence on XMP, so the final test results have not actually improved much.
As the war situation between AMD and Intel in the processor field further expands, AMD obviously needs to make a cut with Intel to ensure that it can stand on the same level as Intel in the war of the next generation of processors, otherwise it will be at a disadvantage again.
After entering the DDR5 era, the main frequency of memory has ushered in a leapfrog improvement, and the basic main frequency of DDR5 memory is even much higher than the main frequency after overclocking of flagship DDR4 memory, and the overclocking ability is a terrible growth.
Therefore, on the new generation of processor platforms, AMD and Intel have invariably increased the cache of the processor to maximize the use of memory performance, while larger processor caches also put forward higher requirements for memory performance. It can be seen that in order to get the best performance experience, overclocking on the DDR5 memory platform is almost a compulsory course for next-generation users, and in this regard, Intel's XMP currently has great advantages.
From the current new generation of DDR5 platform testing, Intel's processor with XMP can achieve automatic overclocking above 6000MHz (default frequency 4800Mhz), and AMD because it does not support DDR5 for the time being, so it can not be tested, but from the past experience, it will be much behind Intel.
XMP in the AMD platform limitations, but also let users can not simply get the memory overclocking effect, can only manual memory overclocking, and manual overclocking memory is often limited by the motherboard BIOS, if the BIOS optimization is not in place, users can only manually timing and voltage adjustment, the complexity far exceeds CPU overclocking.
According to Xiao Lei's installation experience, in fact, many motherboard manufacturers have only optimized the processor overclocking, often ignoring the overclocking of memory, for ordinary users they can only use the automatic overclocking mechanism such as XMP to obtain higher memory performance, and many high-frequency memory itself also need the help of XMP technology to achieve the specified main frequency.
Therefore, from a business point of view, AMD needs to further cut with Intel to prevent future processor wars from being constrained, and from the user's point of view, it also needs a set of effective and stable memory standards to allow users to get a better experience. No matter how you look at it, the formation of AMD's hardware ecosystem must be put on the agenda, only in this way can it counter the ecological advantages that Intel has established for many years.
However, some netizens are worried about whether AMD will start to develop its own memory standards, which will lead to future users buying the wrong memory when purchasing related hardware, resulting in incompatibility. In fact, from the past XMP licensing model should not worry, AMD's RAMP is not actually to replace XMP, but in addition to XMP, for motherboard and memory manufacturers to provide a targeted memory optimization standard, so that manufacturers can provide more powerful support for the AMD platform.
Moreover, for memory manufacturers, although IT is possible to launch AMD-specific RAMP memory, but there is no need for this, find a way to add XMP and RAMP support to the memory at the same time, so that the memory can get the best experience between the two platforms, and the maximum expansion of the user base is in their interests.
At least for AMD users, the birth of AMD RAMP is undoubtedly a good thing, at least to make the memory overclocking of the AMD platform more simple and stable, bringing sufficient performance improvements to users.