Recent updates from motherboard manufacturers have all but confirmed what many AMD users have been waiting for: Zen 6 processors will maintain compatibility with the existing AM5 socket. ASUS was the first manufacturer to explicitly mention Zen 6 support in official marketing materials for their B850M AYW Gaming OC motherboard. MSI has similarly stated that its 800-series boards will be “ready for future CPUs”. This reinforces AMD’s commitment to platform longevity, which is a strategy that served the CPU manufacturer well throughout the AM4 era.
The AM5 platform promise
When AMD launched the AM5 socket in September 2022 alongside the Ryzen 7000 series, the company made a commitment to its users. Initially, the promise was support through 2025, but AMD CEO Lisa Su extended this timeline at Computex 2024, confirming AM5 support through 2027 and beyond. This was and is a fundamental difference compared to Intel’s approach, which has cycled through four different desktop sockets during the same period AM4 has existed.
The AM5 platform uses 1,718 contact pins in an LGA configuration and was designed from the beginning with longevity in mind. It already supports PCIe 5.0 connectivity for GPUs and the latest SSDs, as well as power delivery capable of handling processors up to 170W TDP with Package Power Tracking limits reaching 230W.
It remains to be seen whether the AM5 platform will live to see Zen 7 processors, but with the 2027+ timeline, it’s certainly a possibility.
The BIOS chip size conundrum
An interesting result of of the long-term compatibility involves a discussion of BIOS ROM chip sizes. As noted by HardwareLUXX (in German), Manufacturers like ASUS, MSI, and Gigabyte have been marketing these larger chips as providing “ultimate compatibility” or being “future CPU ready”. Many newer motherboards, particularly those with X870E and X870 chipsets released alongside Ryzen 9000, are shipping with 64MB BIOS chips instead of the standard 32MB, though they’ve been careful not to explicitly name Zen 6 until recently.
The reason for these larger BIOS chips relates to the increasing amounts of microcode needed to support multiple CPU generations. Each new processor family requires its own microcode in the motherboard’s BIOS, and over time, this data can potentially exceed the available storage space. During the AM4 era, some motherboards with 16MB BIOS chips had to drop support for older processors when Zen 3 launched, while others simplified their BIOS interfaces to save space.
However, there’s good news for owners of motherboards with 32MB BIOS chips. Hardware leaker HXL has confirmed that both 600-series and 800-series motherboards will support Zen 6, regardless of whether they have 32MB or 64MB BIOS chips. This suggests that while 64MB chips provide more flexibility and may allow manufacturers to maintain support for all processor generations simultaneously, 32MB boards won’t be left behind when Zen 6 arrives (we hope).
Both 32MB and 64MB variants of the 600-800 series AM5 motherboards support Zen 6. https://t.co/CAGDD392Z9
— HXL (@9550pro) October 10, 2025
What does the future hold for AM5?
Zen 6, codenamed “Morpheus” with desktop processors called “Medusa,” is expected to arrive in late 2026 or early 2027. The architecture will reportedly be manufactured on TSMC’s advanced 2nm process for the CPU chiplets – a major step from the current 4nm process used in Zen 5. One of the most intriguing rumors is that AMD may increase the core count per chiplet from the current 8 cores to as many as 12 cores, which could obviously translate to massively improved multi-threaded performance if chiplet count remains unchanged in upcoming Ryzen 5, 7, and 9 desktop CPUs.
If Zen 6 launches in the expected timeframe, it would make it the third major architecture for the socket after Zen 4 and Zen 5, comparable to the triple-architecture run that AM4 enjoyed with Zen, Zen 2, and Zen 3 (not counting the various refreshes and APU variants).
Exactly what AMD means by supporting AM5 “beyond 2027” is unclear, but the approach could be similar to AM4, whereas Zen 7 transitions to a new platform capable of DDR6 RAM and PCIe 6.0. Neither of these technologies are expected to reach consumers before 2028 or 2029, however.
But regardless of whether Zen 7 also makes it to AM5, the platform has been an unusually future-proof investment for PC builders who got in early.
