The first official reference to the 'AMD Ryzen 9000 series' gives Zen 5 a name and hints at an imminent release date

We've suspected AMD's Granite Ridge family of Zen 5 based processors might show their faces soon, given that AMD has already said it's aiming for a launch in the second half of this year, and CEO Dr. Lisa Su is set to deliver the Computex keynote on June 3. Now Gigabyte has released a BIOS update for several of its AM5 series of motherboards in anticipation of the new chips, and it seems to confirm that they'll be called the AMD Ryzen 9000 series.

In a news post on the company website, the Gigabyte AM5 X670, B650 and A620 motherboards are confirmed to receive boot up support for "the coming AMD Ryzen™ 9000 series", with the most recent AGESA 1.1.7.0 beta BIOS. 

While we've already seen leaks suggesting this name would be used for the new chips, this is the first official announcement that seems to confirm it.

While it's far from certain that the chips will be announced at Computex in June, it seems like motherboard manufacturers are busy preparing their boards for the new chips' imminent release. Intel's competing next-gen Arrow Lake chips have still yet to break cover, although recent rumours have suggested that Team Blue's new CPUs may be closer to release than previously thought, with a potential release in the first half of this year.

In terms of what to expect from Zen 5 when it comes to performance, a recent post by leaker Kepler_L2 has suggested that the new chips are over 40% faster than Zen 4 in the SPEC benchmark. 

While performance numbers at this point are to be taken with an appropriately huge dose of salt, if that performance leap turns out to be true we may be looking at some particularly fast CPUs compared to the previous generation, which weren't exactly slouches in the benchmarks to begin with.

According to the most recent leaks, Granite Ridge is set to be a chiplet design, with an integrated AI engine, some faster memory support and likely RDNA 2 integrated graphics. Given previous releases, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that we'll see some X3D variants later in the product life cycle, and if they're able to provide anything like the immense gaming performance of the 7800X3D and the 5800X3D before them, we'll be very keen to get our hands on them.

After months of speculation it seems like next generation CPUs from both the major players in the desktop chip market are incoming, which means we're not far from seeing AMD and Intel go head to head with some new silicon once again. Now Zen 5 has a name, hopefully it wont be long until we see an announcement, and hopefully some performance uplifts to write home about.